THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE ROHMERANTIC TRADITION THE SCREEN Since Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O- is an extremely faithful adaption of a story by Heinrich von Kleist, a question Rohmer was asked at the film's press...
...Doing an adaptation just now may well have been a form of methodology for Rohmer, a purposeful way to interrupt himself...
...But Trintignant is neither the epic fool of the first story nor the tragic protagonist of the second...
...The plot always goes around in a circle, in other words, and the hero ends up where he began...
...This being the character of Rohmer's work until now, it must be admitted that The Marquise of O- is a disconnection of sorts...
...Aurora observes, as if talking about a Rohmer plot rather than her own, "but sleeping with a schoolgirl just before your marriage wouldn't make a good story...
...Rohmer's answer to the question implied that having made six films he wrote himself dealing with contemporary mores, he had now adapted an historical romance written by somebody else just because doing so was something completely different, a break with his own past...
...These terms make the moral tales sound exceedingly drab, of course, but they aren't in the least...
...This is so slight an event that he ultimately accomplishes it without her even realizing he has done so...
...And once things calm down, the Marquise finds herself inexplicably pregnant...
...There is a scene in Ma Nuit Chez Maud where Trintignant lunches with a friend who boasts of having taken a curve on an icy road at 100 km/hr...
...In Claire's Knee, Aurora (Aurora Cornu) points this out to the hero, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy...
...They are talking about a short story Aurora is writing, and Jerome's relationship with a young girl, a mutual friend who has a crush on him, begins to get mixed in with the story...
...From Trintignant's fate at the wheel can be divined the other salient characteristic of the lives of Rohmer's heroes: nothing happens to them...
...The first of two parts...
...Rohmer's own synopsis of the plot in all his "moral tales" makes it clear that nothing happens in any of them...
...The fact is that The Marquise of O-, like all transitions, both disconnects us from past work and reconnects us with it at the same time...
...At one point in the film Trintignant describes himself to another character as a "mediocre" man...
...Then later-again at a meal, dinner-Maud (Francoise Fabian) laments to Trintignant the fate of a lover who had an accident on an icy road and was killed...
...and after Adrien goes instead to San Tropez where a girl named Haydee (Haydee Politoff) ruins a business deal and eludes his seductions, the film ends while Adrien is calling to inquire about flights to London...
...Indeed, nothing does happen in Claire's Knee either...
...They all have a lot to do but little to say, and nothing to say about themselves...
...Just as the narrator is in pursuit of a woman who, momentarily, seems to elude him," Rohmer explained, "events bring him in contact with another woman, but regardless of the charm and persuasion of the second, he will reject her in favor of the first...
...Godard literally revolutionized himself after he made the series of films that began with Breathless and ended with Le Gai Savoir...
...Truf-faut began his career all over again after finishing the Antoine Doinel series...
...Even so, however, it doesn't follow that he was indifferent to what he adapted, or that he is not still the same filmmaker...
...And if I didn't sleep with her...
...Trintignant says this in self-deprecation, but for Rohmer, to be "mediocre" means to be human...
...Rohmer's past work has all been about "mediocre" people to whom "nothing happens," to put it in terms the films themselves offer...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The characters in Rohmer's films, by contrast, have little to do and a lot to say, especially about themselves...
...Rohmer's films up until now have been an essential part of the New Wave's program to transform the Hollywood conventions that the New Wave directors themselves extolled as art when they were still critics...
...In fact, in a very profound sense nothing ever happens in a Rohmer film, period...
...But the characters aren't exceptional people, nor are their lives full of excitement of the sort conventional in movies...
...He is what Pascal called him in the Pensees, "un milieu entre rien et tout...
...This suggested that Rohmer had done the Kleist story only because, like other New Wave directors, after establishing himself as an auteur with a series of related films, he had felt a need to break the molds of his art...
...Yet for all that, I don't think it is as far removed from the earlier work as it might first seem...
...Rohmer succeeded Andre Bazin as editor of Cahiers du Cinema in 1959...
...La Collectioneuse (1967) opens with Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) being urged by his mistress to come to London with her...
...At the beginning of Claire's Knee Jerome has just come from a fiancee to whom he returns at the end, after his infatuation with Claire...
...It is full of mystery, recrimination, reconciliation and all manner of passion foreign to Rohmer's earlier work...
...On the contrary, they are very lively, and it is precisely in the personality of their characters that their life exists...
...Man is in a middling state...
...without crashing...
...Its story begins with shot, shell and siege, the abduction of the Marquise by enemy troops, and her immediate rescue...
...He develops a yen to touch the knee of the young girl's sister, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan...
...Perhaps Rohmer was just being too polite- he is a very amiable man-in accepting the bias of that question...
...He was asked whether he had really cared what he adapted...
...and on the day after Maud's he again picks up the trail of this blonde, whom he eventually marries...
...Now Rohmer felt he must in some way-any way-free himself from the vision of his "six moral tales", the series he announced when he made La Boulangere de Monceau in 1963 and completed in 1972 with Chloe in the Afternoon...
...Where the conventional hero is the strong, silent type, Rohmer's hero has been garrulous and hesitant...
...I was therefore surprised when Rohmer said, no, he hadn't cared in a sense-the point was just to do an adaptation of something...
...Jerome curbs his desire for the young girl just as Aurora's story anticipates, and he develops instead a fancy to do something so inconsequential and feckless that it is almost no action at all...
...That would be better," Aurora continues...
...THE ROHMERANTIC TRADITION THE SCREEN Since Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O- is an extremely faithful adaption of a story by Heinrich von Kleist, a question Rohmer was asked at the film's press screening at first seemed rather dopey...
...The heroes of the Western, gangster film and other genre work these directors admired as critics are all either lone wolves or empire builders...
...The human condition, in Rohmer's vision of it, turns out in the end to have a surprising constancy...
...He is somewhere betwixt and between their extremes, for when he finally goes out driving on an icy road himself, his car merely gets stuck and has to be abandoned...
...Man is "mediocre" in Rohmer's films in the sense that he is caught in the middle of the Great Chain of Being, halfway between God and a stone...
...To do the film justice, you have to entertain both sides of this paradox at once...
...This is hardly a story in which nothing happens...
...Jerome replies...
...Things musn't happen...
...The "mediocrity" with which Rohmer's heroes feel themselves afflicted is demonstrated by the nameless central character (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969...
...But this was hard to accept...
...What articulate indecision expresses for Rohmer's modern characters, upheaval and dumbfoundedness reveal in these historical figures in The Marquise of O...
...On the day before his night at Maud's, Trintignant trails a blond he spots in the street...
...One can make a good story with banal characters...
...Though she has no recollection of an amorous adventure among all her others, she is expelled from her father's house and must search for her violator through a newspaper ad, which he, incredibly, answers with a proposal of marriage...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 26
