Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, which opened the New York Film Festival, will probably be called a perfect film, and in a way I suppose it is, but it had evaporated a half hour after I saw it. It’s about as forgettable as a movie can be. The French title of the sixth (and last) of Rohmer’s “moral tales” is L’Amour, l’Après-Midi. This time, the setting is Paris, and the hero, Frédéric (Bernard Verley), is a proper, thirtyish, married bourgeois who, out of boredom in the afternoons and vague feelings of anxiety and temptation, becomes involved with a bohemian drifter, Chloe (Zouzou), whom he fundamentally disapproves of. Rohmer’s distinctive quality here, as in Claire’s Knee, is a jokiness that we can’t quite tell how to interpret, but the theme of the series (a man in love with one woman is drawn to another, whom he finally rejects) comes dangerously dose to self-parody this time, as we watch Chloe cast her nets and Frédéric squirm out of them. Maybe Rohmer, who has become a specialist in the eroticism of non-sexual affairs, has diddled over a small idea too long; perhaps intentionally (but who can be sure?), this is a reductio ad absurdum. The will-he-or-won’t-he game (an intellectualized version of the plight of Broadway virgins) goes on so long that the squeamish hero must be meant to be an ass. When, finally, Chloe gets him to dry her after her shower and lies in bed waiting — as inviting as a Modigliani nude — his flight to his wife is comic. Too comic for us to know how to accept the scene that follows — an expression of the love his wife and he feel for each other. We sense, however, the supreme value Rohmer places on marriage, just as we sense his condescension toward women who are available. In Rohmer’s world, people have immutable characters, and they act out what they are; Chloe in the Afternoon is a demonstration of what you see when you first look at Frédéric, still boyishly handsome but already puffy-faced, repressed, sullen from rectitude. There are no surprises in him; he will do everything up to that. Chloe is a danger that he runs from.
The film is trivial because the ambiguities derive not from complexity in the people or the situation but from the fact that so much information is deliberately withheld. Rohmer supplies only enough to tease — nothing that might jar the amused, cultivated tone. The movie centers on Frédéric’s reasons for not going to bed with Chloe, and this is just what Rohmer doesn’t let us in on. When Frédéric wanders the city, glaring — half sick with longing — at beautiful women while telling us it is his love of his wife that makes him love them all, is he a self-deceiving fraud? We don’t know whether his belief in marriage is meant to be a bourgeois love of safety (as Rohmer hints) or a mark of a Catholic sense of honor and of true love and respect for his wife (as Rohmer also hints).
While most artists set up situations selected for their power to reveal, Rohmer, refusing to reveal, sets up arbitrary situations in which he can control everything and not have to bother with the psychology or the messy texture of common experience. In Claire’s Knee, there was the pretext of a novelist’s setting a novel in motion, and the reduction of sexual passion to the delicate impulse to caress a knee; yet the conceits were so charmingly conceited that they were all but irresistible. But what are we to make of this trumped-up condition of anxiety in the afternoons, as if men’s desires for a variety of women were created only by afternoon idleness? Chloe is not lusted after. She happens to come along — less attractive to Frédéric than the gorgeous women he sees on the streets and fantasizes about — and out of his lassitude he lets her draw him into her life. It may or may not be conscious, but Rohmer systematically downgrades and minimizes threats to monogamy. It is priggishly implicit in this movie that Chloe’s attraction is only sensual, not spiritual. A shopworn woman like Chloe, with her big mouth and her Left Bank bangs, is an accident in Frédéric’s life, while his wife represents the ideal attained, the other half of oneself found. Though the wife reveals nothing to us — and her tears are just water — we are, I think, meant to believe in the mystery and beauty she has for Frédéric. The enclosed situation, the foregone conclusion are part of Rohmer’s method. He specializes in taking the energy and drive out of sex; with the passion removed, the old love triangle is turned into urbane chamber music.
The picture’s only achievement is that it goes on so long it gets funny. The prolongation of Frédéric’s miserable indecisiveness makes the audience laugh at him in impatience. Infidelity in the head — unconsummated infidelity — makes a man seem queasy, unmanly. We are meant to laugh. There’s nothing else to do, because Rohmer’s cool game excludes any issues more earthshaking than how long Frédéric can go on stewing before a decision is forced on him. There are, however, small gambits to keep us perplexed: Frédéric tells Chloe he hasn’t talked with anyone so much in years; does he actually have this rapport with her (we don’t see it), or, even if he only thinks he does, does this mean that he feels something has been missing from his life? Is he suffering from a little bourgeois angst? We have no way of answering such teasers. Rohmer plays the role of observer, but his neutral objectivity is totally superficial — an affectation. He’s created a situation with nothing under it.
Eric Rohmer works on a literate, small scale, and, maybe because his work is so different in both scope and appeal from movies made for a mass audience, and especially from our movies, he has been acclaimed here as a much greater artist than I think he is. He’s a superb lapidary craftsman but, I think, a very minor master. Chloe in the Afternoon is impeccably shot (by Nestor Almendros), and everything in it seems precise, fastidious — exactly what Rohmer sought. The words and images are expertly matched, and they’re so prettily rhythmed they seem cadenced. It is a movie of the highest gloss. It is not, however, a movie of deep insight — or generosity of spirit, either. It is, rather, a movie of poetic complacency, a movie for mild chuckles. As for such judgments as the first sentence in a recent article on Rohmer in the Times — “In the four decades since the motion picture found its voice, few filmmakers have used it as intelligently” — I think the truth is that few filmmakers have used it as limitedly, and that perhaps Rohmer’s unruffled assurance and his commitment to the surface of sexual attraction are being confused with intelligence. What is frequently described as rigor and austerity may be no more than polished aridity, polished pettiness. He’s a clever traditionalist in a medium in which bourgeois worldliness can pass for much more.
In “Bad Company,” a hip-picaresque comedy set in the Civil War period, a traveling gang of young con-artist orphans and runaways head West and bump up against a mangy assortment of robbers and killers. The movie was made from an original scenario by Robert Benton and David Newman, the magazine-writer collaborators who wrote Bonnie and Clyde and There Was a Crooked Man . . Benton also directed this picture, and without the intervention of another mind it becomes easier to get a fix on Benton’s and Newman’s talents. They’re terribly bright and almost insistently amoral; that is to say, they lack the gift of conviction. (It is a gift, I think — a form of grace — which often deserts smart, inventive screenwriters, while the stupid come by it all too easily.) Benton and Newman will shape the material in any way in order to get an audience reaction. And the absence of conviction wrecks them here. What might have been a glorious comedy fails on one level because of tepid, almost nonexistent direction and on the conceptual level because there is nothing for the audience to become involved in, except admiration for Benton’s and Newman’s bits of flash and filigree. To put it plainly, they outsmart themselves.
There may be some justice in this, but the waste is maddening: talent is not in such long supply in comedy writing, and Benton and Newman have a style and a spark of inspiration. Their humor is often a syncopated version of Western saloon stories — those gruesomely funny anecdotes about incompetent gunmen and ornery kids and insane, implausible accidents. The authors find their comic horrors in this yokel Americana we share, and their spiked pathos in American cultural anomalies — Bonnie Parker admiring the teeny fingers on a figurine, these mongrel boys who have never known a home listening to a reading of Jane Eyre and trying to decide what a drawing room is. The writers’ slapstick tragicomic tone is peculiarly their own, but unless this tone carries conviction, unless it takes off and becomes magical, it sinks into throwaway gags, or worse. Arthur Penn’s direction supplied the emotional depth that made us care about Bonnie and Clyde, while Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s heavy cynicism in There Was a Crooked Man . . . compounded and soured the flip amoralism, and the movie was offensive — deeply ugly. This movie gets off to a poor, slow start and it never takes shape, yet it has qualities that plague one — emotions underdeveloped or stepped on, poignancies squashed for the sake of a casual tone.
The script of Bad Company probably reads like a box-office dream. But you can practically read the script in the movie. Without a director’s art to hide them, the tricks are all visible. You sit in front of the tiresome yellow-brown autumnal West (Gordon Willis doing in Kansas a reprise of the brownish color and overhead lighting of The Godfather) listening for the zingers and noticing how the plot elements are meant to intersect. You can perceive the dazzle in the script, but what’s on the screen is pictorial and lifeless. If Benton’s direction were up to the dialogue and the incidents, Bad Company might nevertheless fail commercially, because of an excess of cleverness, but it could have made it into the Beat the Devil fluke-classic category, where the vacuousness would have become a nutty virtue. When Bad Company toys with the disgusting — when a rabbit is skinned and cleaned just below our line of vision while we listen to the obscene sounds of entrails being pulled out — we know that the movie is putting us on, just for fun, but most of the time Benton’s direction has a bland, surprisingly dulcet tone, and the jokes simply keep coming instead of being sprung on us. They still manage to be funny (the quick editing on the gun battles helps), but you’re aware that they’re not funny the way they should be. The serious moments aren’t sprung right, either, and they go flat. When a ten-year-old boy stealing a pie is blasted by a shotgun and his body lies in a chicken yard, we can see all the elements for an emotional response; it has what the moments of tragicomic horror in Bonnie and Clyde have, but we don’t feel it.
The bumpkin Fagin of the scrounging boys is played by Jeff Bridges, who, deservedly, has been getting almost as many difficult roles this past year (The Last Picture Show, Fat City) as his talented brother Beau Bridges did before that (Gaily, Gaily, The Landlord). In Fat City, the role of a nice, dumb young fighter didn’t give Jeff Bridges much chance for characterization, but his body supplied some. The way he moved was so unobtrusively natural and right that you felt you knew the kid and understood him. Unusual among young actors, Bridges seems to live in a role easily, physically (the way his father, Lloyd Bridges, used to, in roles like the fighter in The Goddess). This physicality creates immediate empathy for the cheerful vandal he plays in this movie, even though he rattles off his lines without much variation, in that indifferent, fast way that is becoming a new movie cliché. Barry Brown plays a contrasting role — a handsome, courtly boy of “breeding” who joins up with the young toughs in order to travel West with them. Brown is shot in admiring closeups too often, like a juvenile prima donna, and sounds eerily like James Stewart, but the two boys make a good team — the ignorant low-lifer and the sleek, educated moralist — though the contrast is thrown away for a sappy finish.
Benton’s sweetness of touch as a director — which suggests an innate gentleness — comes across best in the quiet sequence in which the ten-year-old’s account of his life is mingled with the well-bred boy’s reading of Jane Eyre to the group. But the writers don’t trust feeling. As in There Was a Crooked Man . . . they just can’t leave you with anything, and so the movie doesn’t go anywhere; it self-destructs. The tall-tale writing produces one triumph, however. The most fatally funny of the boys’ encounters is with a gang of seedy, moronic outlaws led by Big Joe (David Huddleston), a roaring, disgusted egomaniac, Fieldsian in size. He is the most successful satirical character in the movie, and, as anyone who has ever seen Joe Mankiewicz on TV can perceive, a stunning caricature — maybe the funniest portrait we’ve had — of a big-time movie director. Somehow, movie directors are never funny when they’re meant to be movie directors; maybe Benton and Newman had the right idea in making this one a robber chief. The florid self-esteem of a brigand or a buccaneer may go to the heart of what makes a Hollywood winner. When Big Joe hears praise of a younger outlaw’s tricks, he demonstrates how he taught those tricks to the youngster, and crows, “I’m the oldest whore on the block.” There is some danger that Benton and Newman may be trainees. I don’t know who it is that their super-amoralism is for — for some imaginary audience of the frightfully knowing? Is it possible that these extraordinarily gifted men are dumping on everything that could matter most in their work in order to satisfy illusions about swinger-nihilism which they themselves, in their magazine careers, helped to create? How is one to react to the talents of those who don’t value their own talents highly enough? It’s not a question that comes up often in the movie business.
[October 7, 1972]