Everything was foreseen. The third “moral tale” was supposed to be La Fille à la bicyclette, a project particularly dear to Éric Rohmer because he had been thinking about it for more than twenty years. An ambitious project, it involved well-known actors (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Françoise Fabian) and a relatively long film shoot in Clermont-Ferrand. Under these conditions, the failure to get an advance on receipts made it necessary to rearrange the work plan: La Fille à la bicyclette would have to do another lap (though it would retain the number three position in the strict nomenclature of the Moral Tales). With the money that the television broadcast of The Baker Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career had brought in, Barbet Schroeder was able to produce an inexpensive film—one that would at least allow Rohmer to get back to the feature film. It would be La Collectionneuse.
The Broken Vase
This project was also an old one. It dates from a draft of a story Maurice Schérer composed in November 1949, entitled “Chantal, ou l’épreuve.” It was one of the short stories conceived in the wake of Élisabeth, and from it was born the first, literary version of Moral Tales. In it we can discern, already, most of the themes of the film that would be made in the summer of 1966. It deals with two dandies who hole up in a villa with young woman with a bad reputation who combines “an angelic face, a dazzling complexion, and the manners of a middle-school student.”1 One of the men sleeps with her, the other refuses to do so. Playing with fire, he throws her into the arms of a third man, a smooth talker who likes to boast about his finds as a collector:
Garnier had fatuously dilated on the beauties of a vase in his collection that was connected, he said, to the memory of a youthful love affair. All three of us had drunk a lot, and I saw Chantal maneuvering to draw him close to her, right up against the table on which the vase had been placed. […] I saw her give me a complicitous wink and then, all of a sudden, lean back so far that she almost overturned the table.2
This scene was sufficiently crucial to inspire in the young Schérer a second title, which was “Le Vase brisé” (The broken vase). But for the time being, this fetish object is spared a fall, and so is the narrator of this text: a kind of morose Narcissus who never ceases to look for reasons not to yield to the charms of the beautiful Chantal.
Is this situation autobiographical? We can at least recognize in it, at a distance of fifteen years, the nuclear core of La Collectionneuse. Around this core a few ideological points of reference gravitate that were destined to disappear in the final version. In the 1949 version, the action takes place at the time of the Front populaire, and shows us two Rastignacs of the political world. Less opportunistic than his comrade, the narrator prefers to withdraw from affairs of state at the “advent of left-wing governments.”3 Like his future counterpart in the film, he retires into solitude and reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not in order to indulge in some naturalistic reverie, but rather to write a veritable diatribe against democracy:
It was a question of nothing less than redoing all of Rousseau in reverse, laying bare the roots of the evil that is gnawing away at the modern world, of seeking the origins of the disastrous idea of Equality that is killing all our governments, even those that are apparently the most authoritarian. I admit that the general interest is the sum of each individual’s happiness; but the latter can come into being only by rejecting certain rights guaranteeing the coherence of the whole. It is a strange contradiction to claim on the one hand that man is good, and on the other to imagine no other spring of public life than the hateful demand for a theoretical equality garbed in the name of virtue.4
This claimed elitism does not exclude (on the contrary) a somewhat decadent populism. The hero likes to flay his blasé nerves in poor neighborhoods, where he is on the lookout for any trace of a lost vitality. He is the lover of a young working-class girl whose beauty excuses her stupidity. These are just so many ways of increasing his proud superiority and so many motives for unease when confronted by Chantal, who comes to embody the revenge of the “weaker sex” and the defeat of a certain misogyny. All this is expressed in an icy, clinical style halfway between the libertine tradition and Paul Morand’s short stories. Only one clear vestige of this remains in La Collectionneuse: the commentary, a phantom structure of the analytical novel in the French manner that allows the narrator’s self-satisfied discourse to be more or less maintained. But Schroeder insisted on reducing its importance in the final montage, and Rohmer later said he had still given it too great a role. As if the essential thing now was to film a reality that escapes the devices of literature.
The New Cheaters
There is no doubt that people talk a lot in La Collectionneuse, and not only in voice-overs. We hear the echo of the original paradoxes when Adrian (the narrator) refuses to join the vulgar crowd of workers. Or when Daniel (who was called “Dombreuse” in Chantal, ou l’épreuve5) crushes their new female adversary with his haughtiness. Oddly, this 1966 film even brings to the surface elements of Rohmer’s personal history that remained diffuse in the 1949 text: thus Daniel, a provocative and flamboyant dilettante, resembles Gégauff much more than Dombreuse does. In many respects (his voyeurism, his taste for self-analysis, his fear of being trapped by the Other), Adrian proves to be the secret double of the young Schérer. In a tour de force, Rohmer completely masked this autobiographical (of autocritical) field by transposing the narrative into full modernity. The young lancers of 1949, who cultivated their egotistical rhetoric and their contempt for women, are replaced in 1966 by “new cheaters,” who are already blasé from having transgressed all taboos and are now helplessly witnessing the fading of their desire. In short, it is the endgame of the disillusioned postwar generation—of which Rohmer was both the hostage and the prosecutor.
From this to attributing vengeful intentions to him is only a short step, which his friend Dominique de Roux, the founder of Cahiers de l’Herne and a right-wing polemicist, blindly took, writing to him that:
Your film is one of absolutist reaction. […] In La Collectionneuse, I finally realized your worldview through these four antiquarian tontons macoutes taking delight in their egoism […] your hatred of the anti-France element and all the obscenity of this momentary decline that flattens the arts reveals a canine indifference to ordure and immediately transforms any ass into a songbird. It seems to me that through La Collectionneuse you have laid in the most subversive way, through the scorn and hatred of your characters, [the foundations?] for a future Nuremberg Trial of culture, before which we will be able to summon people like Picon and Butor, one or two pretty women, all painters, and secretaries. You believe only in France, a France with its eyes directed inward, a France that has rehabilitated Goethe and Beethoven and Mozart. And it is you, the fanatic, who will turn out to have been able to achieve this tour de force.6
Just as Parvulesco had earlier done with Sign of Leo, Roux attributes to Rohmer polemical intentions that he took great care to expunge from his project. Rohmer might think that the characters in La Collectionneuse represent a certain kind of decadence, a kind of artistic and amorous dead-end, the final stage of the disillusion denounced in 1955 in “Le Celluloïd et le Marbre,” but he is careful not to say it. He limits himself to showing it.
What does he show? Three young people who are “with it” (dans le vent), as people said then. As free in their behavior as Rohmer is puritanical, as cynical in appearance as he is idealistic. In theory, his absolute opposite. But he nonetheless brought them, through a subtle play of supervised freedom, to express his own thought. In an interview given when the film came out (for a broadcast by Pierre-André Boutang), the three actors seem a little embarrassed upon discovering, after the fact, the perversity of the trap Rohmer had set for them. They thought they only had to be themselves, but they were merely portraying figures decided in advance by a mischievous demiurge. La Collectionneuse inaugurates a whole new mode of representation that consists in calling up the outside world in order to confirm an inner vision, in concealing its moral aims behind the unpredictability of life. In pursuing this logic, Rohmer is acting less as a maker of fiction films than as a maker of documentaries: he seeks to put on film neither actors nor characters, but people in their own right, caught up in the currents of their lives and the impurities of their biographies.
First it was Patrick Bauchau, the handsome son of a good family, who flaunted his elegant looks at the Café de Flore and at Cahiers du cinéma. He had already appeared in Suzanne’s Career (playing the lucky man chosen by that “collector” avant la lettre) and in the televised version of La Bruyère’s Les Caractères. This time, he was to be the incarnation of the modern dandy. Alongside him was his friend Daniel Pommereulle, whom he had introduced to Rohmer and who played more or less himself, an experimental artist making assemblages of unusual objects and talking with brio about his work. That is what he does in the prologue to the film, in the company of the art critic Alain Jouffroy (the same who hastened his scandalous notoriety by displaying his works among those of the artists he called “the Objectors”). Another speaker was a film journalist who took the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg to play the figure of the collector. Barbet Schroeder writes:
Rohmer would never have issued a casting call to choose among a thousand people. His casting always proceeded through connections. Patrick Bauchau was close to the New York Times film critic Eugene Archer, and the latter was given the role of the rich American in the film. The problem was that he had a tendency to drink too much and that he was really not a born actor! There, we suffered…I saw how the system that consists in filming only with amateurs could degenerate.7
But Rohmer needed these amateurs to embody his fiction, so that it existed in him before it existed outside him. Thus one evening at Paul Gégauff’s villa in Pontoise (which was rather similar to the one seen at the beginning of the film), he made the acquaintance of a beautiful stranger who was preceded by a whiff of brimstone. Like the Chantal in his old story, she combined “an angelic face, a dazzling complexion, and the manners of a middle-school student.”8 In addition, she had a Louise Brooks haircut and just enough androgyny to complete the portrait of a dream-woman. Her last name was Politoff, and her first Haydée, an allusion to a fabulous character in the Count of Monte Cristo. She worked in real estate, which was less romantic—but Rohmer had finally found his collector. Jackie Raynal recounted how Rohmer told him this in the middle of the editing of Place de l’Étoile:
One day I saw Rohmer coming, and he told me: “I found her!” He showed me a photo that she’d given him, because he’d told her that he was a film director. He put the picture, which was the size of a postage stamp, on the drum. And then he began to write La Collectionneuse on the basis of that photo.9
In reality, Rohmer never wrote La Collectionneuse. Instead, he constructed a trap, a rather closely woven dramatic canvas that would allow him to watch his three young people develop. The first draft of the scenario left a certain number of speeches unfinished and focused on working out the situations in detail. On that basis, the film was written on a tape recorder, an instrument that Rohmer discovered with delight when he was declaiming verses by Racine or the commentary for La Sonate à Kreutzer in his office at Cahiers. For hours, he recorded the remarks made by his actors, who had been asked to speak freely about their passions and love affairs but urged to keep their eyes on the ball, always with a view to the film to be made. It was only during the day-to-day filming, for once in a rather Godardian (or Truffaldian) manner, that Rohmer gave them the dialogues he had imagined. To a very great degree, he took his inspiration from their expressions, their linguistic tics, their ways of being. The work in progress did not stop there. The custom was to prepare for the shots through multiple rehearsals, in which Haydée, Daniel, and Patrick (all three of whom kept their real first names in the story) continued to invent the text they were going to perform in front of the camera. For Rohmer, this was an unprecedented experiment, one that he dared repeat only twenty years later when he was filming 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle. However, care was taken to send the recordings of all these experiments to Pierre Cottrell, Barbet Schroeder’s very young assistant. “This dialogue was not improvised,” he explains, “but worked on the spot, on the basis of a subject set by Rohmer, with their own vocabulary, which was rather exotic for him. My assignment was, in addition to informing him about the rushes, to write a scenario on the basis of these cassettes—a scenario that was to be royally rejected for an advance on receipts!”10
Thus people talk a lot in La Collectionneuse, in the written form of commentary or in the oral form suggested by the actors (with the active complicity of the director). But they do so the better to emphasize what goes beyond language, what cinema alone can show: the beauty of a body filmed from every angle, as the prologue shows it to us. The grace of the movement of an arm, the mystery of a smile—whose meaning Adrien wonders about. More broadly, everything that escapes the (masculine?) grasp of consciousness and discourse, including the bodily lapses that betray, in the two male characters of the film, the rage they feel on seeing Haydée and the ineffable something she represents escape them. For example, Daniel’s feet constantly bumping into the fireplace as he is making a violent indictment of the so-called “collector,” in a feverish compulsion that was improvised by Pommereulle and emphasized by Rohmer. Thus the director is like a spy, seeking to discern in his actors a disposition of which they themselves are not aware (no French actor, Rohmer remarks, would have been able to kiss a pebble as gracefully as the Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau did), revealing how far being exceeds the limits of speech, how much the real, in its splendor and its surprises, is irreducible to the meager categories within which we claim to confine it.
To capture this splendor and to welcome these surprises, Rohmer found in Nestor Almendros the ideal head camera operator, one who combined a subtle pictorial culture with an amazing resourcefulness. It was he who convinced Rohmer to make La Collectionneuse in 35 mm (which would be no more expensive than enlarging a 16 mm copy); and it was he who refined, on the shoot, a system of indirect lighting by using mirrors that marked a milestone in the history of cinema. A future head camera operator, Philippe Rousselot (Almendros’s second assistant starting with My Night at Maud’s), referred to this small revolution:
I was still in film school when I saw La Collectionneuse. And I said to myself: “I absolutely have to work with the guy who did the lighting for this film!” That was the first time I hadn’t noticed the means by which a film had been lighted. Which didn’t prevent the images from being magnificent!11
The means were all the less perceptible because they did not exist: five mini-floodlights and mainly sunlight bounced off the walls and the ceiling. Controlled outside thanks to Rohmer’s trick of filming the dialogues under a tree, thus avoiding decreases in the intensity of the light. This constant recourse to improvisation was not only a constraint connected with a more or less deliberate shortage of money (the budget was limited to about 30,000 francs), it was also a form of asceticism that protected the film from the artifices of the “beautiful image” and helped it retain its core of lived experience.
The same holds for the filming conditions, which had all the marks of amateurism. Unpaid actors and technicians, all housed in the villa that the producer had found near Saint-Tropez, which was also the film’s main setting. A beach down below, but one that resembled “a dump,” Rohmer wrote, “where plastic bags piled up. With the actors, we spent two hours cleaning the beach. What pleased me in this landscape was the long path that descended from the village to the sea and that enabled us to fit in the long commentary that accompanies the film.”12 Meals were entrusted to a little Italian lady whom Schroeder had recruited on the spot. “The problem was,” he liked to say, “that she knew how to make only one dish: minestrone. It was always the same thing, and people complained a little. For the last day on the shoot, I tried to be generous: I bought a big leg of lamb and gave it to the cook. But when we sat down to table, we were served minestrone. We told ourselves that it wasn’t a problem, and we ate it out of politeness…and I asked her when the leg of lamb would arrive. “Ah! Didn’t you see the pieces of meat in the minestrone?”13 This improvised conviviality created a bond among the players more surely that any direction of the actors could have done; but Rohmer also made use, without letting on what he was doing, of the tensions between the Bauchau-Pommereulle pair and Haydée Politoff, which were frequently manifested in macho sarcasms, the very ones that their characters later uttered on the screen.
In this strategy of trapping, the onetime shot played a central role. Here too, this corresponded to a financial imperative: not wasting the small amount of film available, to the point that hardly 5,000 meters of negatives were made, so that the lab entrusted with developing them thought the film was a short! And each shot, as we have said, was prepared by meticulous rehearsals. Rohmer even asked his actors to begin moving before “Camera!” was called out, in order to be immediately in situation. Everything was done to give that moment maximum intensity, to create a kind of dramatic epiphany—in which the player no longer differs from what he is playing, in which it becomes true before the simultaneously perverted and delighted eyes of the director. Thus the meagerness of the means, the reduced number of technicians, the errands that had to be run in St. Tropez at the last minute to dress Haydée, and so on were of little importance. This austerity served Rohmer’s purposes: it made all the false prestige of “cinema” fall away and allowed the blossoming of the nature of beings (and nature itself) in the pure state.
A Whiff of Scandal
Similarly, Rohmer decided not to add experimental music to the film (as had for a time been discussed with the composer Michel Fano), focusing instead on the materiality of ambient noises, crickets or airplanes. “A year in advance,” his editor Jackie Raynal wrote, “he had noted down all the sounds that were heard around the house, in the scrubland (warblers, nightingales). On the shoot, there was only direct sound. But he made use of Michel Fano’s sound library and birdsongs recorded by amateurs. I heard him say on the telephone: “Are you sure it’s a grass warbler? The one that sings between 2 and 5 in Saint-Tropez?”14
If music came in—and this was a principle Rohmer was to respect scrupulously in the future—it was insofar as it was physically present in the field of the narrative. The only exception to this rule was the credits. Wanting them to be accompanied simply by a drum set, Rohmer found an African tom-tom at Schroeder’s place. He seized it and recorded himself, accompanied by his producer tapping on a copper basin. He had his editor listen to this “model”: Did she know a musician who could take his inspiration from it? “She was well-connected—and she told me: ‘We can just use that! It’s great!’ And that’s what we did, we used this thing without rhythm, completely crazy. So from then on I told myself that it wasn’t worth the trouble to find musicians for films!”15
To put this work on the sound track, they had to find new financing. On the basis of a film that was silent and in black and white from end to end (and which Rohmer had put together all by himself in his corner, as he was often to do as a prelude to the montage of his films), Schroeder organized a showing for Georges de Beauregard. After thirty minutes of this austere film, Godard’s and Demy’s producer started to nod off. It was then that a voice (that of Pierre Rissient, called in as a reinforcement) whispered in his ear: “Look! The mental orgy is about to begin.” Beauregard sat up, and once the film was over, he agreed to provide the money necessary for the postsynchronization of the film. He left, chuckling at a joke made by Rissient, who immediately rejoined a sickened Rohmer. “Pierre,” the filmmaker sighed, “I know that you said that for the good of the film…but please! Don’t talk about it that way.”
But that was in fact how the film was sold. As an erotic chronicle of the liberation of the way people behaved, not very different from Roger Vadim and his audacious illusions. The preview was conceived in this spirit, assembling (apparently) spicy extracts. And so was the poster, which represents a woman’s hand caressing hairy legs…Claire’s Knee before its time and in reverse? All this had little to do with what La Collectionneuse is about, but it was this legend that was printed in the newspapers. And then the film was banned for minors, which finished making the film as glamorous as it was taboo. It was shown in March 1967 at Studio Git-le-Coeur, which had recently opened and presented itself as an “up-to-date” place. The film was launched on the occasion of a very exclusive preview attended by Paris high society. There were two Baron Rothschilds. Fernand Gravey and Marcel Carné—who might have seen in La Collectionneuse a reminiscence of his Tricheurs (which in any case had won over Haydée Politoff, since she agreed to be in his next film, Les Jeunes Loups)—were also there. Along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Deneuve, who was soon to write a laudatory letter to Rohmer (“I often think about it and it is a very pleasant feeling not to be able to forget a film”16). And even, hidden under a dark wig, Brigitte Bardot, who came to applaud her young sister Mijanou, who appeared furtively at the beginning of the film, where she plays herself as Patrick Bauchau’s girlfriend. People were particularly moved to know that Brigitte Bardot was in the audience, and they clucked with pleasure at the most cynical speeches: “I find it less dishonorable to live with a friend than to work for the state.”
With La Collectionneuse, Rohmer found success: in general release, the film drew more than 300,000 spectators. Many young women adopted Haydée’s short haircut, and many young people wore djellabas like Patrick Bauchau’s, or the polaroid sunglasses worn by Dennis Berry (the future husband of Jean Seberg and Anna Karina). The film was shown exclusively at Studio-Git-le-Coeur (its advertisements called it “the youngest theater in Paris”) and won the first prize at the Prades film festival, where the jury was headed by René Clair. It won over even the most blasé critics. Michel Duran, for example, who summed up well the general craze for the film in the weekly Le Canard enchainé: “The rural landscapes of Ramatuelle, a few views of Saint-Tropez, the house in the Var, the interiors, everything is pleasing to the eyes, especially because in the middle of all that we see a girl with a round face, a turned-up nose, and eloquent eyes who is as perfect as they come.”17 The few dissenters (Michel Aubriant, Robert Chazal, Pierre Billard) who denounced the emptiness of the script or the aridity of the mise en scéne merely added thereby (in contrast to what happened with Sign of Leo) to making the film desirable because it was modern, as if the vaguely ribald, picturesque quality of the situations made the austerity of the writing acceptable, and identified Rohmer (against his will?) with some prophet of the events of May 1968.
Two or three columnists proved more perspicacious as to the ambiguity of Rohmer’s point of view, whether to stigmatize his “right-wing” culture, as Marcel Martin did in Les Lettres françaises, or to attach him ironically to the tradition of Marivaux, as Jean-Louis Bory did in Le Nouvel Observateur (this was the beginning of a long career for that convenient journalistic label). In the course of a “for and against” discussion with the Catholic Francis Mayor in Télérama, Claude-Jean Philippe raised the level of the debate (he repeated almost the same arguments in Cahiers du cinéma). Of course, the characters in La Collectionneuse are immoral: they certainly do not read Télérama! Of course, they are incapable of communicating with others. But their problem goes beyond that:
They want to make their minds go blank, to find nothingness, but the mirror is always there and it reflects their thoughts back to them infinitely, producing a kind of vertigo. Rohmer thus emphasizes the drama of modern thought. Its inability to get outside of itself. […] The film had to be beautiful, supremely beautiful, to bring out, in a light that was never so warm and golden, this feeling of a paradise offered and refused, of an innocence doomed to anxiety. We are surrounded by an obviousness of the world, of things, of people, of beings. This obviousness is marvelous at the first glance, that of the artist.18
One could not more subtly unmask Rohmer’s secret procedure: exhausting all of consciousness’s pretenses the better to celebrate the absolute truth of cinema.
If All the Guys in the World of Cinema…
Despite the success of La Collectionneuse, the third of the Moral Tales was still a dead letter in the spring of 1968. Little concerned with political events, Rohmer was thinking only about making his film La Fille à la bicyclette—which became My Night at Maud’s. But the film encountered two obstacles. First, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s indecisiveness; Rohmer had offered him the leading role in his next film, that of a Catholic engineer who likes to seduce women but is tormented by moral scruples. But Trintignant was not a Catholic, and he saw himself more as a victim of love than as a Don Juan. His hesitations confirmed Rohmer’s notion that the actor cannot be basically different from the character he plays. But Rohmer wanted Trintignant to play the part and was prepared to wait as long as it took to get him to agree (and for him to be available). The second obstacle: the project failed twice to get an advance on receipts, and this caused its production to be suspended, because the budget was considerably larger than that of the preceding film (about 600,000 francs). To convince the president of the CNC, Rohmer wrote him a carefully argued letter reminding him of the necessity of making the Moral Tales in a certain order and of the efforts he had made to reduce the amount of commentary in his scenario (that was the main sore point).
Finally, couldn’t I adduce a “new fact” in my favor, namely the release of the fourth tale, La Collectionneuse? It may have given an idea of my way of filming and shown to what point my mise en scène is irreducible to discursive speech. My strongest supporters praise its discretion and even, they say, its “transparency.” Is a virtue on the screen a defect on paper? Only the effects, the tricks—everything I hate—can be written down. That is why I admit that my bare text is not sufficiently convincing: if it appears provided with its literary characteristics alone, that is because I refuse to say what cannot be said.19
There was nothing to be done, and My Night at Maud’s might have remained in the shadows of Rohmer’s filmography (as had Une femme douce, which joined that of Robert Bresson), had a providential figure not intervened: François Truffaut. Was it a desire to offer revenge to his great elder, who was still seen as the humiliated father of the New Wave? Was it remorse for having helped evict Rohmer from Cahiers? We know that this double movement (kill the father/pay homage to the father) was to some extent Truffaut’s weakness. However that may be, the maker of The Four Hundred Blows was prepared to spend whatever it took to ensure that the film’s financial needs were met. First of all, by becoming a coproducer, alongside Barbet Schroeder and Gérard Lebovici. Second, by developing the luminous idea of a consortium of producers—in which each one would “purchase,” by making a modest investment, part of the future dividends. By late 1967, the undertaking was well advanced, as is shown by a letter from Truffaut to Mag Bodard:
I believe it would unjust to go back on this, given that Rohmer is one of the greatest French filmmakers and also one of the most serious. […] Claude Berri, Abicocco, Gérard Lebovici are loyal and faithful, and so are Barbet Schroeder (who is taking two shares of the production) and Jean-Luc Godard, who told me this morning: “It’s an honor for me to put my name on a film by Rohmer.”
Truffaut adds, referring to the other film he was trying to cofinance with Berri (Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue): “We will certainly not participate in either of these two affairs with a view to earning money, but in the hope of not losing any and especially with a desire to help realize these two fine projects.”20 But fissures soon appeared in this admirable unanimity: Mag Bodard withdrew, and so did Godard and Jean-Gabriel Albicocco. Michelle de Broca, Nicole Stéphane, and Louis Malle, who were busy putting together other difficult financial packages, all declined to help with My Night at Maud’s. Claude Lelouch, who had been asked to handle the distribution of the film, indulged in a strange waltz of hesitation.
In the middle of May 1968 Lelouch wrote Truffaut a long letter that looks for all the world like a flat refusal. In it he expresses the foreseeable reservations. Too much commentary, too many references to Pascal, too much austerity—all of which make the film unsalable. Curiously, he adopts and reverses the arguments that Rohmer defended at the CNC:
My Night at Maud’s seems to me very literary, not at the level of the dialogue, which is well-written, but at the level of the conception of the film. I mean that on reading this scenario I never had the feeling that I was reading a scenario, but rather a book; that may be what Rohmer wanted, since he wrote in the first person what is usually written in the third. That worries me, because I don’t sense a filmmaker’s will, but rather that of a storyteller. Now, anything can happen, for better and for worse, in the mise en scène.21
These concerns did not prevent Lelouch from leaving a door open at the last minute: “However, I am delighted that several producers are associating to produce a film considered noncommercial from the outset, and I am eager, at any price, to participate in this kind of experiment.”22
Barbet Schroeder took Lelouch at his word, and even persuaded Rohmer to go with him to meet this possible distributor. The meeting (arranged by Rohmer for 5:30 A.M.!) led nowhere, because Lelouch claimed that he had just noticed that the film was planned to be in black and white. Another cold shower came from the Union générale cinématographique, in the person of its president, Claude Contamine. Invited the see the final product, almost his only reaction was a laconic remark: “You’ve made a nice film, M. Rohmer.” Contamine, a good Catholic (who had just been married in the Church) hurried off to telephone Truffaut and ask him whether he could get his friend Rohmer to shorten the church scenes. In any case, he abided by the distribution agreement, and the CNC ended up giving 100,000 francs after the battle. A singular way, Rohmer was to say later, to apply the principle of an advance on receipts…In the meantime, Truffaut put together a board of seven producers. In addition to those already mentioned, it included Danièle Delorme, Claude Zidi, Pierre Braunberger (who came in at the last minute), and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who had decided to join the venture. His partner Françoise Fabian was also tempted to participate, but Rohmer balked at that—because eleven shares had already been distributed. This was supplemented providentially by Pierre Cottrell, when they were getting ready to film in Clermont-Ferrand and money was running short. Thanks to his grandmother, he was able to give the 20,000 francs necessary to cover the costs.
Cottrell also had no share of the receipts from the film. But having taken over Schroeder’s functions (Schroeder had left to make his film More), he was the one who paid out the dividends to each of the shareholders—not without arousing some bitterness on Truffaut’s part. As he wrote to Rohmer:
Every time I’ve committed Carrosse to coproduce a film made outside, I’ve been disappointed in one way or another, and when I wasn’t, the director and his financier seemed to regret the arrangement. Thus Pierre Cottrell, a year after My Night at Maud’s was released, said straight out: “I think the coproducers of the film received a sufficient profit, and we’re going to stop sending them money.” I mention the example of My Night at Maud’s because it is, along with The Testament of Orpheus, the only coproduction that fulfilled the hopes I had for it.23
Truffaut was a good sport, and he finally agreed to give up his rights (at the request of Margaret Menegoz, the future treasurer of Films du Losange). But he did so to return to Rohmer the ownership rights to his film. On that day, he even wrote a fine letter to all the 1968 producers asking them to do the same. Most of them agreed. In the case of My Night at Maud’s, la politique des auteurs was not an empty phrase.
La Fille à la Bicyclette
What made this project so scary? In the first place, as we have seen, it was its “literary” dimension, conveyed through an omnipresent commentary (at least in the early versions of the scenario). As for La Collectionneuse, it is in reality the trace of a hidden, very old infrastructure that also took the form of a novella. In 1944, Maurice Schérer was writing a text entitled “Rue Monge,” in which we find the essential elements of My Night at Maud’s, beginning with a theme that was to run throughout Éric Rohmer’s films: that of voyeurism, spying, tailing. Long before The Aviator’s Wife or Triple Agent, the narrator of “Rue Monge” was someone who wants to see without being seen, who follows a pretty girl in the street, as if to take possession (through his eyes) of her life. When she almost spots him he takes refuge on a square, in no hurry at all to give up his observer’s position. An obsession that tallies with two other obsessions, no less Rohmerian avant la lettre. On the one hand, the obsession with controlling space. The geography of the Latin Quarter, with its intersections and bifurcations, is described with extreme precision, as if it were a trap carefully prepared for a female prey. On the other hand, it is time that has to be controlled, in all its implications—including that unreliable ally, chance, which the narrator constantly invokes the better to ward it off. Under these conditions, the famous “night at Maud’s” (already more or less what it later was in the film, right down to the name of the character and the presence of an obliging third party) turns out to be the inconceivable moment par excellence, the one that escapes the influence of premeditation.
It’s true that, being a very slender brunette, Maud hardly corresponded to the kind of woman I’d previously desired, and even on the day when I first spoke to her in the Metro, the idea of having a fling with her never occurred to me. […] My series of failures ought to have encouraged me to be bolder when I got the opportunity. But the contrary is no less plausible, and one might very well think that after searching for what can only be called the impossible, I must have felt an instinctual repugnance toward something that was offered so naturally.24
There we have the bases of the idealism that was to inspire Rohmer’s whole work (whose culmination may have been La Marquise d’O). An idealism that called from the outset for the cinema, as the sole power capable of both satisfying and transcending it, but which for the time being retained a narrowly rhetorical form: that of an endless calculation of causes and consequences, of ins and outs—to the point of verging at times on an interpretive delirium. The young writer’s tendency to split hairs was not abandoned by the mature filmmaker without hesitations. When he went back to this foundational canvas in the early 1960s, he continued to decorate it with an omnipresent voice-over, a voice-over of the consciousness that comments in the first person on the protagonist’s actions. But it is also a voice of the unconscious (which is less common in Rohmer) that makes itself heard at dawn after the long night spent at Maud’s: “I was with Françoise, lying in the big farmhouse bed, at the bottom of the crater of a volcano in the Auvergne, white with snow. Maud and Vidal were standing, one on each side of the bed, dressed as Mephistos, laughing mockingly: “Well! That’s pretty! That’s pretty!” Françoise’s body was pale, hard, and frosty as marble, and we lay down naked and immobile, like statues. And the cold invaded me, paralyzing me more and more.”25 Other significant elements reinforce the symbolism of the remarks: the first homily heard in the church, which denounces the modern superstition of chance (the very one that the narrator defends); the dialogue with the character of Vidal, a Marxist philosopher who engages in brilliant developments of Blaise Pascal’s dialectical thought.
So many residues of the literary project that erase the making and the editing of the film. The commentary? There remain only two occurrences of it, at the beginning and at the end of the narrative, as a discreet way of establishing (and putting in doubt) the theoretical framework in which the narrator claims to be situated. The sermon from the pulpit? It was freely delivered, on the basis of the fundamentals of the mass, by Father Guy Léger, a Dominican friend of André Bazin’s, a movie lover who returned to his monastery at the end of his day on the set. As for the philosophical dialogue, it was entrusted—at least insofar as the Marxist point of view is concerned—to the improvisation of Antoine Vitez, Rohmer’s spokesman on educational television. “I am very struck,” he wrote to Rohmer, “by the coincidence between Vidal’s ideas about Pascal—and in general, the ideas debated by the two men—and my own reflections. If you wish, I will tell you what I myself had in mind, and you can use it, if the occasion arises.”26 In this way, the application of Pascal’s wager to the Hegelian meaning of the story becomes a solo in its own right, sung by Vitez, and the object of a documentary view right in the middle of the fiction, on the same footing as the violinist Leonid Kogan’s performance or the discussions in the cafeteria at the Michelin factory. More secretly than in Sign of Leo or La Collectionneuse, Rohmer seeks to blur the original architecture of his scenario by giving it, here and there, the style of a newspaper report.
Actors Without Paradox
He went still further. Just as he asked Vitez virtually to play his own role, he did everything he could to make Françoise Fabian feel that she was Maud. First, by choosing her for the same reason his narrator chose to marry Françoise, the “girl on a bicycle” met in the street: because she was who she was and not someone else, in a way as obvious as it was arbitrary. This begins like a vaudeville scene at the Marigny theater, where she was playing in La Puce à l’oreille. Timidly, Rohmer slipped into her dressing room, gave her the scenario of the film, and immediately disappeared. Without knowing it, Truffaut followed him, telling the actress: “Éric Rohmer, who is a great filmmaker, is going to offer you something, you absolutely have to do it.” Convinced by the text as much as by Truffaut, she said yes. That was the beginning of a long series of lunches at Lipp’s, which Françoise Fabian described this way:
Rohmer and I talked about the most diverse subjects. About life, about death, about love, about desire, about fidelity, about religion…but never about film! I think that I amused him (I made him laugh, I provoked him a little), and that he would like to get to know me better…So I experienced the filming of My Night at Maud’s as a continuation of our conversation.27
There was no gap between the private person and her cinematic avatar. Remaining loyal to this principle (which he had set for himself as early as La Collectionneuse), Rohmer gave Fabian (Maud?) a maximum of initiative: she could choose her navy blue jersey and her bedspread, stop in the middle of a speech to light a cigarette, or forget the presence of the director (the same director who had told her, after viewing the first rushes: “I no longer have anything to tell you. Maud is yours”). This freedom was not without risks for the actress, because Rohmer observed a second principle: that of the single take, a take without a net and without any second thoughts. Françoise Fabian found out how hard that could be when she was making her most difficult sequence, Maud’s confession, which was filmed in close-up and dealt with the tragic end of a love affair. Displeased with her performance, the actress wanted to redo the shot. She asked it as a favor, for her last day on the set. Her partner, Trintignant, even offered to pay for the retake and took out a 500-franc bill. As if it were a matter of saving money! Rohmer ended up yielding, but he knew very well that he would end up using the first take.
We might call that a “tactics of the flagrante delicto,” which consists of making the actor his character’s hostage, while at the same time pretending to give him free rein. It was to have effects far beyond the film. Thinking she was free to play anything at all after the sublime Maud (in this case, the role of a corrupt banker in a spaghetti Western), Fabian received a very curt letter from Rohmer telling her how much he disapproved of her choices. The only already known actress he had ever used, she nonetheless remained identified with Maud more than with any of her other roles. She willingly acknowledged this, with a mixture of fatalism and melancholy: “The character resembles me. I’m an atheist, independent, I work, I’m a widow, I live alone. I don’t fit into a mold.”28 The capture of a personality, so to speak, through which Rohmer transfigured the autobiographical elements in his narrative.
The procedure became more tortuous with Trintignant, precisely insofar as he was perceived as an alter ego. By giving him (at least in the scenario) his own first name of Jean-Louis, by going to film the epilogue in his vacation home in Belle-Île, Rohmer also suggests a confusion. As for the rest, he limited himself to giving the actor technical advice connected with articulation. Trintignant recalls:
The scenario was written in a very rigorous way. Even the “uhs” of hesitation were written into it…You had to remember all that and say it faithfully, and at the same time listen to Rohmer, who talked a lot. Since I was trying to concentrate on my role, I’d bought wax earplugs so that I wouldn’t hear him too much…But when I took them out, I realized that he was saying very intelligent things!29
Rohmer gave the same kind of “indirect” direction to Marie-Christine Barrault, who, like Trintignant, had been chosen for her physical and mental resemblance to her character—even though she was truly Catholic and had just emerged from a convent for young women. She had played only a few roles in the theater, under the direction of her uncle Jean-Louis Barrault. Once hours had been spent taking tea and talking in the offices of Films du Losange, once hints about how best to make tea (but this time in a scene in the film) had been given, the director limited himself to watching her act. Each time, it was as if Rohmer had made a bet on a person. And as if he expected a cinematic reward a hundred times over.
A Gamble on the Cinema
We know that this theme is at the heart of My Night at Maud’s. It was far from the sinister Paris that was the setting of “Rue Monge,” in which people got mired in schemes to mitigate the penury of the Occupation. In the 1968 film, we sense that Rohmer was seeking to sublimate his youth, or more precisely to displace it, because we find it in it many personal elements, but nothing is in the same place anymore. The impoverished student of the 1940s has become a brilliant engineer. The Latin Quarter is replaced by Clermont-Ferrand, where Rohmer did preparatory studies (as we recall), but also where Blaise Pascal was born. In this new framework, the scenario arranges encounters and recognitions that are easier to justify in a provincial city: at mass, Jean-Louis meets an unknown woman with whom he falls in love. Also by accident, he runs into a former schoolmate (Vidal), who introduces him to the beautiful and sensual Maud, at whose home he spends the night. With her, he remains chaste, because he is faithful to the image of the young woman he met the day before: Françoise, the unique, the Catholic. Again by chance, he meets the woman who will become his wife—but about whom he learns, in a final and cruel coincidence, that she has been the mistress of Maud’s husband. Thus strengthened, the canvas of the 1944 narrative allows private memories (Rohmer’s platonic passion for Odette, his marriage proposal to Thérèse) to hover at the same time that it establishes a great Rohmerian subject: the hesitation between fidelity and independence in love. It was, moreover, under this sign that Rohmer sold to the press the whole Moral Tales series: bound to a woman, a man flirts with another woman and finally comes back to the first. In reality, only Love in the Afternoon explicitly realized this formula.
The film’s second major theme is Pascal’s Pensées, around which the protagonists’ conversations gravitate. A reminiscence of student bull sessions? The influence (to imagine Vidal played by Vitez) of the communist philosophers who were then acknowledging their spiritual questionings? Rohmer had no doubt read Lucien Goldmann’s Le Dieu caché (The hidden God), which reinvented Marx in the light of the Jansenist philosophy of Port-Royal. When he was doing his university preparatory studies, he seems to have met Roger Garaudy—whose disavowal of Marxism in favor of Islam was later to be a sensation. Not to mention the Entretien sur Pascal that Rohmer had recently made for educational television, in which the philosophical paradox of My Night at Maud’s can already be discerned: in both cases, it is the representative of Christianity that plays the devil’s advocate, that is, the advocate of a humanity excessively denigrated by Pascal. But as was often to be the case in Rohmer’s work (and already for Rousseau, in La Collectionneuse) the work quoted in the body of the film is hardly more than a theoretical reference point, a prestigious Plato’s cave from which the character is literally summoned to free himself.
The Jean-Louis of My Night at Maud’s can reread and quote Pascal all he wants, he is in no way one of the latter’s disciples. He rejects Pascal’s rigorism, having no intention of giving up the pleasures of the table or those of love. He even goes so far as to indulge in a certain Jesuitism (at least that is what Vidal accuses him of) by developing a complete more or less specious system of casuistry to reconcile nature and grace. Besides, he is completely aware of these contradictions, and if he deludes himself, it is rather regarding his “luck”—which allows him to avoid the anguish of choosing and gives him the impression that he has found his beloved by chance. Here we are very far from Pascal and from the simultaneously terrifying and thrilling risk that the famous wager offered. On the other hand, we are very close to “Rue Monge” and the self-portrait of Schérer as a young fanatic, infatuated with an evanescent female image that he had to catch in a trap. That is perhaps the hidden theme of My Night at Maud’s, and it has directly to do with cinema; with the curse on cinema, to adopt the Catholic terminology that Rohmer (secretly) shares with his character. Consider the opening shot in which we see Trintignant’s dark silhouette take possession of the landscape by the intensity alone of his gaze (as if he were the reincarnation of Murnau’s great predators, Nosferatu or Mephisto). Or consider all the sequences filmed inside a car, from the point of view of a man who is avidly scouring the city’s streets, seeking—and knowing—someone to devour. At such moments, it is a kind of guilty ambition that Rohmer is staging: the ambition to imprison the real by keeping an eye on all its external signs. The very ambition that he put to work while filming My Night at Maud’s.
For the first time, he had an adequate budget and a “real” assistant, in the person of Cottrell (who carried out the slightest of his desires). He applied as much as he could the program of the narrator of “Rue Monge,” and that of the theoretician of La Revue du cinéma: first of all, control space. When filming the trips back and forth in the car, it was not a matter of going down just any street with the camera. There was a very precise trajectory to be respected, even if it meant that the team had to turn around for each sequence. A fetishism that was increased by the use of black and white, with its contrasts and its stylization that ended up evoking silent film. But recourse was also made to the studio, situated (think of that!) in the Mouffetard quarter, for the very long scene in Maud’s apartment. Rohmer decided on that in order to obtain total silence and to be able to compose the set in his own way: in that ascetic room dominated by a snowy white (echoing the snow that is supposed to be falling outside), he himself placed the elegant Knoll furniture and the reproductions of works by Leonardo da Vinci—which correspond to Françoise Fabian’s style of beauty. Before engaging in the gamble of the single take, he spent hours placing this or that object, mumbling to himself all the while. This irritated his main actor, who was not used to this strange way of working. “What are we doing?” he whispered to his partner. One fine day, Trintignant openly criticized Rohmer for paying less attention to him than to the ashtrays. To which the filmmaker replied: “I’m less worried about you than about the ashtrays.”
Next, control over the weather. No matter what the imponderables of the forecast. Did snow start falling after the street sequences in Clermont-Ferrand had been filmed? Too bad, they will be filmed again. Was Trintignant supposed to find his car covered with snow the next morning? Fine, they’ll just let the snow fall all night. All this was based on a subtle calculation of the probabilities, which was only one of the countless tricks for taming chance. This premeditation even played a role in the shooting schedule. “Rohmer wanted our filming to end at a certain time of year,” Trintignant recalls, “and I didn’t know why. One day, he told me that he was supposed to run in the Figaro cross-country race—and that it was very important to him not to miss it…So the film had to be finished first.”30 Rohmer’s perfectionism was not limited to the filming, as two newcomers to the little crew later testified. Jean-Pierre Ruh, the apostle of direct sound whose work Rohmer had admired in Jean Eustache’s films, and who, from Maud on, provided him with that supplementary aspect of realism. A realism that could be obtained only at the price of a maniacal precision: “He often came in,” Ruh said, “only to record sound matchings, silences, atmospheres (for example, to cover the apartment in My Night at Maud’s), he came to listen with me. I said to myself: “How much trouble he’s taking to edit the stages, waiting an hour to have the right atmosphere, for the cut to be made and redone.”31
The same meticulous jewel-maker was described by Cécile Decugis, who became, from this film onward, his official film editor (replacing Jackie Raynal, who had left to live in New York). This pal of Godard and Truffaut, a woman politically active on the Left, who had gone to prison for having helped the FLN at the end of the Algerian War, and who wasn’t afraid to say what she thought, was henceforth to adapt more or less to Rohmer’s discipline. She recalled:
He [Rohmer] knew exactly what he wanted. There was no hesitation. There was never one shot too many. As for me, I was merely an executor! He sometimes made comments. While we were viewing the scene in which Marie-Christine Barrault admits to Trintignant that she has had a lover, he murmured: “This heart-breaking scene…” In fact, I always thought he behaved more like a writer than like a filmmaker. One day he said to me: “To make films, you have to think a lot.”32
At every stage, Rohmer thus sought to extend the control traditionally reserved for literary practice (at least his, at the time when he was writing “Rue Monge”), to delegate to cinema the ideal of the demiurge that literature had abandoned. However, if My Night at Maud’s is perhaps his masterpiece, it is insofar as this ideal is challenged. Through the alterity of his actors, as we have seen, the filmmaker confiscates and encourages at the same time. Through the emergence of the unexpected, summed up magnificently in the last sequence, when the suspicion regarding Françoise’s past indiscretions disturbs the vacation picture-postcard. For this new “moral tale,” Rohmer went far beyond the hide-and-seek game between image and language to which La Collectionneuse could be reduced. It is the cinematic project itself that he stages, entirely aspiring to what escapes it.
A New Thrill
Even if the project evolved along the way, Rohmer never gave up the “radicalness” that so frightened his first readers. A black-and-white film whose action takes place in Clermont-Ferrand and is articulated around theological discussions; a forty-five-minute scene in a room in which nothing happens—except words…Another wager, and not a small one, on the audience’s capacity to listen and pay attention. In the editing studio, the filmmaker himself wondered about his chances of success (“After all, it’s a film in which there are three masses!”). Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, My Night at Maud’s was shown after an endless black-and-white short from Eastern Europe: the story of a child who chases a cat through a church. When this was followed by Father Léger’s sermon in Rohmer’s film, the audience gave free vent to its impatience and sarcasm. Trintignant returned to Paris in a black mood. Soon afterward, however, the retribution came from the United States: invited to present the film at Lincoln Center in New York, Françoise Fabian was applauded by a wildly enthusiastic audience and deluged with requests for autographs. Pierre Cottrell met with the same response in Los Angeles, where the film was in competition for the Oscars. Barbet Schroeder still can’t get over it: “One of my great experiences was having seen My Night at Maud’s in Cannes, with its audience of hairdressers and free seats: they didn’t like it all, they were bored, they got up and left. It was a flop as bad as Antonioni’s L’Avventura…A little later, I saw the film again on the other side of the Atlantic: there they saw all the humor in the dialogues, it had become an American comedy!”33
Once the misunderstanding in Cannes was over, My Night at Maud’s became (who would have thought it?) a success in France as well. The film was to be shown for a very long time, and to date more than a million tickets have been sold. That makes it the greatest commercial success in Rohmer’s career, even though it is certainly also his most austere work. How can we explain this paradox? Cottrell offers a somewhat trivial answer: “Rohmer was not an idiot: he knew that by choosing Françoise Fabian (Pierre Lazareff’s protégée) and Marie-Christine Barrault (the wife of Daniel Toscan du Plantier, then assistant to the advertising executive Bleustein-Blanchet) he was increasing the chances that his film would win support in the press.”34 In any case, the film would gain in glamour. More seriously, it seems that critics and spectators liked (against all expectations) exactly what had put off the financiers. From the veteran Claude Mauriac (in the Figaro littéraire) to the neophyte Michel Ciment (in Positif) and the militant Jean-Louis Bory (in the Nouvel Observateur), critics were unanimous in praising the spiritual and intellectual elevation maintained by My Night at Maud’s, the quality of its writing, the rigor of its mise en scène. Including even the very conservative Robert Chazal, who as early as the showing at Cannes, minimized his reservations: “This unconventional film, in which Catholic morality plays a large role, surprised and in large measure won over an audience that current cinema had little prepared for this kind of film. The success is only all the more meritorious, and with My Night at Maud’s Éric Rohmer has placed himself, at the age of 49, in the first rank of our film directors.”35
Henceforth there were few reservations…except in Cahiers du cinéma. Bonitzer, writing in the name of the review’s new leftist orientation, offered a clearly ideological analysis. According to him, My Night at Maud’s is a right-wing film that praises the conjugal ideal at the expense of freely lived desire and plays with the idea of chance only in order to reinforce the moral mission of destiny. Taken inversely, this tendentious reading of the film explains the magnitude of its success. My Night at Maud’s came out at a propitious time, just when people were getting tired of the excesses of May 1968 and the audacities of the New Wave. Finally, characters who are less interested in making love than in talking about it! And talking about it in such an elegant language, far from student provocations, worthy of the highest French tradition. From this point of view especially, Rohmer fully succeeded. It was Michel Mardore, one of his former pals at Cahiers, who noted mischievously:
Ten years ago, a subject like that would have made people laugh. This film wouldn’t have drawn five thousand spectators. Today, “old-fashioned” feelings have a faithful audience, whose numbers are growing. […] It is becoming clear—and the interest taken in Rohmer’s film confirms it—that God and morality are gaining ground in our society. […] How did a single filmmaker, in France, succeed in becoming aware of this reality? Why was he the only one who, before everyone else, realized the existence of this desire for reflection, for seriousness, while his colleagues still adhered to the sempiternal theory of gadgets and yé-yé [This is the French version of the Beatles’s “yeah! yeah!,” but it became an independent term and style, especially in figures like Serge Gainsbourg.—Trans.] dances? In short, why is Éric Rohmer on time? Because he was always late. Knowingly. With a backward-looking obstinacy that found its justification only two years ago, when La Collectionneuse showed his harmony with the century.36
A strange irony of fate that made the old postwar puritan the best observer of the late 1960s. A status that Rohmer was not soon to lose.
Thanks to the consecration of My Night at Maud’s, Rohmer had free rein to give concrete form to his last two Moral Tales. The fifth of them was entitled Claire’s Knee, and as in the preceding films, it was a story that had been conceived long before. It derived from an almost immemorial image, a kind of childhood “Rosebud” that the filmmaker mentioned casually in the course of a conversation: “It’s the primary element, water…The idea of tears and rain…It seems commonplace, because people say that when ‘someone weeps’—at least, people said it in the countryside where I lived—then ‘it’s going to rain.’ But I like simple things like that. And then it might also involve a childhood memory, one of my oldest, that of a little girl who was crying in a barn or shed while it was raining outside, and her big sister was consoling her.”37 To return to this “primal scene” forever associated with his little cousins in Tulle, many detours and false routes had to be followed (as always in Rohmer’s work).
At the outset, a draft of a story strangely entitled “Who Is Like God?” (Qui est comme Dieu?), which begins with this sentence taken from the Marquis de Sade: “It is not pleasure that makes people happy, but desire and the obstacles that are put in the way of realizing that desire.” This is already the whole program of Claire’s Knee, and the latter was already the title taken by the second version of the story, which is dated 1949 and dedicated to Jean Parvulesco. In a style reminiscent of Rousseau’s in the Confessions, or of the Proust of Les Jeunes Filles en fleurs, Maurice Schérer confirmed his favorite themes. Especially voyeurism, practiced in this case by a Don Juan in his thirties who has decided to turn over a new leaf by marrying a certain Lucinde, but who cannot help ogling two adolescent girls playing tennis below his windows. He goes so far as to climb out on a branch the better to enjoy the show and even to hide their stray tennis balls in his apartment in order to attract them into his lair. And then there is a blatant fetishism that gradually invades the narrator’s consciousness and focuses on a specific part of the body: the knee. He intends to limit the possession of the body of Claire (the wilder of the two) to touching her knee, and to do so he elaborates imaginary situations—until one rainy day when he succeeds in making her cry by speaking ill of her boyfriend.
What measure is there of pleasure, if not the idea we have been able to form of it in advance? My fingers lay so precisely on the spot that I had marked out for them that the contact with this unknown flesh did not cause my senses the surprise that should have been its value. I was thinking of only one thing, that I was doing what I had desired and this idea alone exhausted the infinity of my pleasure. […] It seemed that I had suddenly cut myself off from the world and there no longer existed anything but this body that was pouring all its life along my fingers.38
Two other motifs as contradictory as they are complementary assert themselves in the course of this text: fidelity, which is cultivated as a value in itself, even if it suffers imperceptible strains (causing the narrator to resort to a “bad faith” clearly indicated at the outset). And jealousy, which triggers the perverse machination. It is when Claire is seen allowing a young greenhorn to caress her that a strategy of revenge has to be pursued: a revenge of the mind on the flesh, the revenge of the manipulating adult on the insouciance of adolescence. All these elements find their place in the 1970 film, but not without a bizarre intermediary step. This is a scenario entitled The Rose Garden (La Roseraie), published in the fifth issue (1951) of Cahiers du cinéma under the signatures of both Éric Rohmer and Paul Gégauff. The tone has changed. It comes closer to cinematic objectivity, through a division into sequences and a coolly descriptive narrative. In it, we see the emergence of a confidante (Mme de B…) whose function is to hear the narrator’s confessions. And in it we see especially the sadistic mark of Gégauff, who makes this character a distinguished dilettante who gives the young Claire piano lessons (between sessions devoted to gardening or photography). When she learns that she is pregnant by a boyfriend, M. H informs her of his doubts regarding the boy’s fidelity, driving her to despair and suicide. M. H feels no remorse, as this handsome “scoundrel” admits to his old woman friend as he sabers a bottle of champagne at Monte-Carlo—without ever mentioning Claire’s knee.
Drastic Measures
Almost twenty years later, Rohmer returned to his original scenario, stripped of the melodramatic pathos that Gégauff had given it. This was the time when Rohmer made up his mind to make a final break with his diabolical mentor of the 1950s. Shortly after Maud came out, he went to visit Gégauff and told him, out of the blue: “It’s over, I have freed myself from your influence.” He subsequently focused this new story around a minimal psychological question: How was the protagonist (whose first name was now Jérôme) going to manage, with the most honorable intentions, to touch the famous knee? Hitchcock himself would never have dared construct a film around such a slender MacGuffin. And Rohmer had never before had such resources at his disposal, whose deployment contrasted with the modesty of the intention. This was because My Night at Maud’s had made such a great impression in the United States, as we have seen, especially on a bold young producer named Bert Schneider. He was the son of a big shot at Columbia Pictures who had just dazzled everyone (including even his father) by producing the flagship film of what was soon to be known as “New Hollywood”: Easy Rider. Thus he had been given a blank check to finance any project he wished, and he chose Claire’s Knee, which his friend Pierre Cottrell had told him about. As Cottrell told it,
Columbia made contact with the Films du Losange agent for foreign sales, Alain Vannier (who was a former collaborator of Truffaut’s). Vannier told them: “This isn’t really a film for you.” They insisted, and insisted…and finally they offered us a sum that was $500,000 more than the estimated cost of the film! They wrote up a fabulous contract for Rohmer giving him 30 percent of the profits.39
These terms were all the more munificent because it took hardly six weeks to film the picture (from mid-June to the end of July 1970) in a single setting, namely Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie. For the first time, Rohmer had a set photographer in his crew, and he also had a camera dolly (with a zoom lens). He took the time to view the rushes as they came in, and he even allowed himself to refilm a sequence. At the request of his sound engineer, Jean-Pierre Ruh, who had invented a clever system for producing artificial rain, he even allowed himself the supreme luxury of having the mixing started over again. This comfort in the final touches went along with an extreme preparation, Rohmer’s weakness, which nothing frustrated this time. Taking his inspiration both from Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings and from Murnau’s Tabu (one of his main references when he was a critic), he planned the interplay among the colors of the actresses’ clothes, which were supposed to stand out against the blue of the mountains and the lake, thanks to the 1.33 format. He also played the Great Clockmaker of nature, planning to film the cherry-picking scene only on the day when the fruit was completely ripe. “But the maddest case of anticipation,” Barbet Schroeder recalled, “was for the sequence in which Jean-Claude Brialy leans down to pick a rose. A year earlier, Rohmer had planted the rose at the spot where it was supposed to bloom, calculating the date when it would open, which was written down in the work plan…Everything happened as planned!”40
Jean-Claude Brialy: there, too, Rohmer prepared the ground long in advance, to ensure the participation of an actor very much in demand. At the time of Cahiers, they knew each other and were on familiar terms, and we can guess that it was Brialy’s dandyism in the style of Gégauff (a memory of Cousins?) that led Rohmer to offer the role of Jérôme to him rather than to Trintignant, who was very eager to get it. The offer was made, moreover, before My Night at Maud’s was filmed, while Brialy was acting in La Puce à l’oreille at the Marigny theater, with Françoise Fabian. Attracted by a text that was already written, Brialy immediately agreed. Two years went by. In the spring of 1970, he received a telephone call from Rohmer asking him to be ready to film the following June, and giving him only a single directive: to let his beard grow. Rohmer’s one oversight was forgetting an essential element of Brialy’s personality: his taste for luxury. Brialy showed up at the shoot in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and was amazed to find the spartan room that had been reserved for him. After a sleepless night, he moved to a chic hotel in Talloires.
A Summer Camp
Rohmer discovered the future setting of Claire’s Knee when he came to Annecy to present La Collectionneuse. The filming took place in two villas that corresponded perfectly to the dramatic configuration he envisaged. The one in which Jérôme is supposed to be staying, with its mural frescoes (one showing a “blindfolded Don Quixote” that was to play a role in the final scenario). And the other, where the two girls are spending their vacation, which was in fact to house the whole film crew. It was a leisure center for employees of the company that made Gillette razors. Except for the few privileged people invited to sleep in the house, and except for Rohmer, who was lodged not far away with his wife and children, everyone else stayed in rather uncomfortable little cottages. In one of them, Cottrell went through the rushes every evening on an improvised Moviola. Not content to correct Columbia’s extravagances by his obsession with waste (his “collector’s drives,”41 as Schroeder drolly put it), Rohmer insisted on observing a quasi-military schedule. Rising at dawn, he began with his morning run, and on his way he sometimes woke up his troops. Sometimes the sound recordist disappeared in the middle of breakfast to go off and record birdsongs. As Cottrell emphasizes, “Rohmer had been able to elicit a devotion rarely seen.”42 Even he mysteriously disappeared in turn, only to return hours later and resume the filming at a steady rate.
Photos of the shoot show us a Rohmer who is tense, concentrated, obsessed with the countless details of making his film. But all around him, the atmosphere was that of a summer camp, where everyone yielded good-humoredly to the demands of this rather mad big brother, because Rohmer had the brilliant idea of surrounding himself solely with young people. Fabrice Luchini, for instance, an apprentice actor (and former hairdresser) whom Rohmer discovered in a small role in one of Philippe Labro’s films, and who impressed him from the first time they met by reciting Nietzsche to him. He was twenty years old, crackling with intelligence and humor, and he made the whole Claire’s Knee group laugh until they cried by imitating Rohmer or by developing one of the far-fetched theories that were his specialty—to the point that Rohmer let him improvise his own text in front of the camera, reducing Brialy to the role of a dumbfounded listener. There was also Gérard Falconetti, the grandson of the actress in Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc, whose impeccable physique was displayed in a swimsuit on the lakeshore. His insolence immediately seduced the filmmaker: it was precisely the insolence of Gilles, Claire’s arrogant fiancé, responding haughtily to the plebeian campers who dared to walk on his flowerbeds. That sequence was also improvised, as if Rohmer were trying, with each of his young actors, to blur as much as possible the boundaries between reality and fiction.
The same thing happened with the actress playing Claire. But the choice was more difficult, because it was a question of finding “a young high-school student with fascinating knees”43 (that was the wording in a advertisement in France-Soir) who would be more or less capable of playing the role. Several of Rohmer’s friends scoured the notable sites on the Left Bank, looking for the rara avis. Until one day one of them spotted, as she came out of the Royal Saint-German hotel, a young woman who seemed to have the desired characteristics. Her name was Laurence de Monaghan. She was a pretty sixteen-year-old blonde, reserved and quiet, who was getting ready to take her baccalaureate examination at the convent school in the rue de Lübeck (not far from Films du Losange). Rohmer visited her respectfully in her parents’ apartment, where they engaged in a contest of timidities worthy of a play by Labiche. Rohmer finally made so bold as to take her to the Trocadero garden, where he photographed her bare knees and her face, which his camera captured as that of a hunted animal. He hesitated. He wondered whether he was going to hire this girl “who is not particularly talented,” he recognized, “but who has a voice that I like a lot, but it isn’t a theatrical voice. I think I’ll take her.”44
Laurence de Monaghan was not at all an actress and had hardly any desire to become one (it was her mother, a movie lover, who urged her to accept the filmmaker’s offer). This made her all the better suited to the confusion Rohmer wanted between the actress and the character, to the point that only the person subsists, in her individual brilliance, instantaneous and ephemeral. Her mentor even took care to warn her against the mirages of celebrity, and he arranged special treatment for her (as he did for other beginners in his film): the opportunity to improvise her text in certain sequences, and even to play with very private feelings in the manner of a follower of Actors Studio. She recalls:
For the scene in which I was supposed to cry, he had talked to me to put me in the mood, to help me find in myself the emotions I might have felt…but without telling me: “At such and such a moment, you will do this.” He had put me in a state conducive to tears…After the scene was shot, I saw that he was satisfied. But it can’t be said that his direction of actors was very clear.45
Can one even speak of directing actors? By inviting Laurence to play Claire as her own role, by choosing her clothes from her girl’s wardrobe, and by reducing to a minimum the number of takes and the waiting time between them, Rohmer set a clever trap that sought to make his actress forget the presence of cinema.
The Three Muses
Better yet, he gave her the illusion of being the author or coauthor of the film. Today, that status is claimed by Aurora Cornu, who is convinced that she invented her speeches on the spot, whereas they were at most inspired by her particular verbal style. A verbal style that Rohmer knew well, because he had known this Romanian woman of letters for several years and liked her frankness and anti-conformism. Together, they spent whole afternoons reorganizing the world on the second floor of the Café de Flore or visiting Parisian churches. She was even (along with Parvulesco) one of the few people invited to dinner at the home of Maurice Schérer, because he suspected her of not always having enough to eat. Around her, he practiced with delight the art of conversation that was his most constant passion. Thus it was quite natural for him to offer her the role he had once imagined with Gégauff: that of the confidante whose function is to listen to Jérôme’s erotic turmoil and hesitations. But he added a supplementary dimension to it that was connected with both the personality and the culture of Aurora Cornu. Aurora (her first name in the film) was to be a novelist, recounting to her interlocutor, in order to stimulate him, a sketch of an abandoned narrative: in it we recognize the episode of hide-and-seek played with the girl tennis players in the first version of Claire’s Knee. She plays at being God, constructing an imaginary novel in which Jérôme is the main character, and little Laura and her sister Claire as virtual partners.
Why in the world did Rohmer, who was not much inclined to this kind of mise en abyme, allow himself for once to embed a narrative in the narrative? The answer must perhaps be sought in a text written after the film came out, entitled “Letter to a critic…” Criticism in general was to greet with enthusiasm Claire’s Knee, the brio of its dialogues, and the beauty of its photography—to the point of awarding it the Louis-Delluc Prize for 1971. At the same time, considering Rohmer’s intentions “reactionary” (because he advocated the refusal to take action, within an idle and protected micro-society), Jean-Louis Bory did not conceal the pleasure he found in this fifth “moral tale.” He compared it mischievously with Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin: “Once upon a time on the shores of a lake…The wolf doesn’t eat Little Red Riding Hood(s). Not because he’s a moral wolf. Because he’s a complicated wolf. Eating the pot of butter is enough to make him happy.”46 No, the reproaches came mainly from the eternal defenders of a “visual” cinema who accused Rohmer of lending priority to the word and according little importance to the image. Those were to be the arguments (already heard many times) of a Georges Charrensol or a Pierre Marcabru—who, during a broadcast of Le Masque et la Plume, relegated Rohmer to the literary tradition of Benjamin Constant and Jacques Chardonne.
“My cinema, you say, is literary: what I say in my films, I could just as well say in a novel.”47 To which Rohmer opposes precisely what constitutes the nature of his cinema: the diversity of the elements of the world that he limits himself to showing and in which the word plays only one role among others. Although he recognizes the novelistic origin of the scenarios of Moral Tales, he situates it more in the neighborhood of Balzac or Dostoyevsky (authors whose works teem with vivid characters). For him, to make a film is to lend the complexity of life to a linear argument: “I no longer think so much about the latter, which is a simple framework, as about the materials with which I cover it and which are the landscapes in which I situate my story and the actors that I choose to play it. The choice of these natural elements and the way I can hold them in my nets without altering their life forces, occupies most of my attention.”48 At the same time, he explains why he gave up on the commentary that in the first Tales created a rather abrupt gap between the narrator’s thoughts and his actions. Especially since in Claire’s Knee the actions are limited to a dreamed-of moment (the one in which it will be possible to touch the knee in question). That is when the woman novelist intervenes, making it possible to analyze after the fact Jérôme’s timid audacities, whether they are imagined or real. Through Aurora’s mediation, Rohmer escapes from both the conventions of commentary and those of the “confidante,” while at the same time pretending to dispossess himself of his narrative. It is no longer the filmmaker (or his double Jérôme) who wanted this whole story, it was an exotic and exuberant demiurge who amuses herself by pulling the strings. While he, the true author, withdraws into the shadows.
We spoke of dispossession. It takes a still more complicated form with the film’s second muse: the young Béatrice Souriau, whom Rohmer renamed Béatrice Romand, and who quickly made herself the choice for the role of Laura. Descended from a rather modest pied-noir family, this somewhat rough-hewn girl had nothing in common (except inexperience) with the distinguished Laurence de Monaghan or the haughty Haydée Politoff. However, she pleased Rohmer with her tomboy side, her frankness, and her inexhaustible glibness. With her, he resumed the practice begun for La Collectionneuse, which consisted in talking about this and that with his actress, recording it all on tape. This allowed him to use a few of her formulas and reflections in the final version of the dialogue: “I must need paternal or maternal affection. That’s why I’m comfortable with someone older. I find in him something like a father. I want to be always at his side, I want to be little with him, I feel good. […] I’m not at all friends with the people I love. That makes me nasty. […] When I’m in love, it occupies me entirely.”49 By making Laura talk with Béatrice’s words, Rohmer pursued the previously discussed strategy of delegating his powers to the other person and erasing his own tracks.
He did so at the risk of putting in question his authority as a director. He had to reassert it when a violent argument broke out between Brialy and “little” Béatrice who, right in the middle of filming a sequence, whispered to her elder to look at her. Or when Béatrice complained about the liberties she claimed Fabrice (Luchini) had taken with her, forcing Rohmer to decide between them. With the exclusiveness of her tender years, the teenager pulled every imaginable trick to ensure that she was the preferred one: “During the shooting,” she recalls, “Rohmer situated himself in line with the camera, and took delight in watching me act. I was able to act exactly the way he wanted, it was magical, telepathic.”50 She even aroused an emotional response in him, insofar as he seems to have identified with the character of Jérôme. For example, during the trip to Annecy, when he dared to touch her knee and ask: “What effect does that have on you?” A response sufficiently serious for Aurora Cornu, who was a great mystic, to take her friend Éric to meditate in a church, while she poured a few drops of holy water under his temptress’s pillow! On reading a letter that Rohmer wrote Béatrice Romand a few months later, we can hardly doubt that he did in fact fall under her spell. But she had flown off to Iran and never received this letter, which was returned to the sender.
I’m writing to you from an anonymous café in the Saint-Lazare quarter, which will be the setting of my next film. What an idea to film amid the roar and pestilence of motors, when all I had to do was come up with a story that took place on some enchanted island or in a green valley, and to invite my friends to join me there—as we did last year! So far as I’m concerned, it’s as if you were currently on the moon. A Persian Béatrice defies the imagination. I can dream only of the one in Talloires, and more precisely, these days, of the one of the first moments of our stay there. But what do you care? I suppose you are sufficiently absorbed by the present; and anyway, I am too—aside from these brief instants of nostalgia—ruminating on the final episodes of Chloe in the Afternoon, before picking up my pen to write. I told you that I have to miss something in order to feel like writing. Missing you is probably reason enough.51
Between the lines, this tells us everything about the relationship with Béatrice that loomed during the filming on the lakeshore: the dream of an idyll with a girl, the danger of sin barely approached, the return to normal and especially to work—to the point that one wonders whether this parenthesis did more than nourish the filmmaker’s imagination. Not only the imagination of Chloe in the Afternoon, as we will soon see, but already that of Claire’s Knee, which saw Jérôme’s feelings with regard to Laura only the better to make them visible.
But one muse can hide another. The true story of Claire’s Knee, at least the one that gives the film all its weight of embodiment despite the chastity of its theme, was lived by Rohmer some time earlier. We find its point of departure in a little note sent him by Jacques d’Arribehaude, a writer and television man, just after La Collectionneuse came out:
I would like to meet with you as soon as possible regarding a film that a producer and Haydée [Politoff] are interested [in making]. If I could […] choose a “master” for my first feature film—if it depended on me alone—it is certain that my choice would be you, who enjoy the full approval of the producer and the woman friend who had the initial idea for the scenario.52
The woman friend in question was Roussia Rotival, a rather capricious Russian who conceived a script entitled Les Deux Filles. Against all expectations, against Marcel Carné, and Éric Rohmer, she obtained the prestigious advance on receipts offered by the CNC for 1968. She wanted her project to be carried out by d’Arribehaude (her companion), and she also wanted the “two girls” whom she had imagined to be played by her two daughters. One of these was an enigmatic brunette, the other an extroverted, excitable blonde whose name was Irène.
This is where Rohmer came in. Officially, to advise d’Arribehaude, who had never made a feature-length film, and who, moreover, soon distanced himself from the project to devote his time to television work. Unofficially, Rohmer spent long hours drinking tea with the mother and the two girls in their house in Dreux. Or directing Irène in little amateur films that were supposed to prefigure the work to come, while at the same time he encouraged the teenager to take courses on theater. She had no interest in that. Because she was lazy, to the great despair of her mother, who was eager to make her an actress. Because she was in love, especially, from the moment Éric Rohmer appeared before her. “I was often compared to Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine,” she recounted.
I saw him as the knight, Hans. We saw a lot of each other, we spent afternoons together. Since I was dreaming of becoming an archeologist, he took me to the Tutankhamun exhibition. Then he took me back home, then I accompanied him back to the Metro, then he took me back home, and so on…He told me: “You are the only woman who walks at my pace.” I told him I was in love with him, but he replied: “My little Irène, I’m married and I love my wife.” “No, you’re going to divorce her.” My mother (who was rather accommodating with regard to all this) told me: “You have to make Éric dream so that he can write his subjects.” I think our affair made him dream.53
Who Is Like God?
It was the dream element that nourished Claire’s Knee, far more than any particular memory. The scenario of Les Deux Filles, which was never made into a film, was forgotten; of it there remained in Rohmer’s film only bits and pieces of situations. The figure of Irène was doubled through the characters of Claire and Laura. One got the attractive blondeness (and at the same time the ability to arouse jealousy as soon as she takes an interest in a boy of her own age). The other got an intimidating way of throwing herself at an older man. It is as if the filmmaker were playing with these flirtations with girls, Irène Skoblin and soon Béatrice Romand, the better to protect himself from them through the cinematic fiction. What does Claire’s Knee represent, if not a man who prefers his desire itself to the object of his desire? A triangular desire, according to René Girard, since it asserts itself as if by chance at precisely the moment when Jérôme finds Claire in the company of a man. At the apex of an unfolded ladder that takes the form of a…triangle. But for all that it is not a question of stealing the girl away from her young boyfriend but of experiencing around her a more mysterious power. That of staging.
By focusing on the furtive contact with Claire’s knee, rather than on the conquest of her body as a whole, Jérôme puts in motion the Freudian mechanism of sublimation and its artistic development. By indulging in spying and manipulation in order to achieve his goals, he acts as a metteur en scène, obscurely realizing the ambition of the short story written in 1949: “Who Is Like God?” Let us recall these few lines: “I was thinking of only one thing, that I was doing what I had desired and this idea alone exhausted the infinity of my pleasure. […] It seemed that I had suddenly cut myself off from the world and there no longer existed anything but this body that was pouring all its life along my fingers.”54 The wheel has come full circle, and it even takes us back still further. To the barn surrounded by rain where as a child Maurice Schérer had seen a little girl crying, and fixed on that image.
But there is another source of information that resurfaces along the way. In a famous passage in his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described his pastoral escapade in the area around Annecy…and the encounter he had there with two girls: Mlle Galley and Mlle de Graffenried. After having led their horses to shelter, and after having dined sitting between them “on a three-legged stool,”55 the young Jean-Jacques indulged in very innocent games with his new friends. He climbed to the top of a tree and threw down cherries that sometimes landed in a bosom. He made so bold as to kiss the hand of one of the girls, and began to dream about the other as a confidante.
Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallantries, and remark, that after very promising preliminaries, my most forward adventures concluded by a kiss of the hand: yet be not mistaken, reader, in your estimate of my enjoyments; I have, perhaps, tasted more real pleasure in my amours, which concluded by a kiss of the hand, than you will ever have in yours, which, at least, begin there.56
By thus giving priority to the suspended time of the imagination, where ordinary mortals would have rushed onward toward the goal, Rousseau was already writing Claire’s Knee.
The Magic Ray
Rohmer was to deploy these powers of imagination openly in the following film. For him, it was a new challenge to be met, as he wrote in the previously quoted letter to Béatrice Romand:
By the way, I think I’ve found my leading man, an actor who has been sidelined and whom I would like to rehabilitate, he’s blond, blue-eyed, a little mad: but my earlier characters were too lacking in madness. This film has to be a little crazier than the others, closer to dreams, more sinuous, denser. The background will be the crowd. I’m more and more eager to film it. Tomorrow I’ll go back to sit in the same place with my Beaulieu [camera] and film the people passing in front of me. It won’t be picturesque at all. It will be very close to a cliché. I like that.57
The same year that Bresson made his Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Rohmer, not yet over his failed encounter with Dostoyevsky, also took his inspiration from latter’s story “White Nights,” developing the theme of a double life: Can one love two persons at the same time? But first, making his narrator an impenitent dreamer who is fascinated by the flow of urban life and dreams vaguely about women he has met on the street. To this reference to Dostoyevsky we must probably add a memory of Jules Verne, with the allusion to a magical talisman that is supposed to allow the dreamer to attract the desired creatures.
This was to be the most famous sequence in Chloe in the Afternoon, in which we can agree to see a fanciful parenthesis in Rohmer’s work, which is usually so Cartesian. In reality, it merely prolongs the reflective intuition already sketched out in Claire’s Knee (and in the short story “Who Is Like God?”): like Jérôme, the Frédéric of this sixth “moral tale” takes up the position of the film director, voyeur, manipulator, and spiritual guide. A guide who bears a striking resemblance to Rohmer when the latter speaks of his actors: “My relation to them is mysterious. I wouldn’t say that it is a magnetic phenomenon, but in fact I don’t see any other expression.”58 Especially since each of the women desired (and for the most part seduced, thanks to the talisman) emerges from one of his earlier films with the essential attribute that characterized her: irony for Haydée Politoff, outspokenness for Françoise Fabian and Aurora Cornu, hesitation for Laurence de Monaghan—who is accompanied, moreover, by a boyfriend who closely resembles the one in Claire’s Knee. In one of the first drafts of the scenario we find an explicit definition of this revealing effect produced by the amulet:
In order to spice up, through a convention, the rules of a game that is too easy, I suppose that the machine can’t do anything by itself. It simply deprives my victims of all the false modesty that stood in the way of my logic, and confronts them with their truth. That’s why I have to formulate my request differently in each case. And success is not automatic.59
Here we are at the heart of the Rohmerian paradox. Even as he asserts himself as a demiurge, as the absolute master of his creation, the filmmaker feels a resistance of the real that proves to be the stronger. A resistance of which Béatrice Romand is the spokesperson, though she was the least wild of the girls in the Moral Tales. When Frédéric (Rohmer?) tries to make her succumb in her turn to the spell he has perfected, she escapes, and that produces the following dialogue:60
I: Are you coming with me?
She: No.
I: Why not?
She: I’m going to someone else’s place.
I: I…uh…
She: There’s no point in saying “uh”! You won’t find any argument. He’s the only one I love, I’m happy only with him. That, dear sir, is irrefutable.
A word (“irrefutable”) that the actor was to have trouble pronouncing during the postsynchronization session Rohmer wanted (to add to the oneiric side of the scene). But which clearly shows the limits of the dream—limits to which this film quietly leads us.
The Resistance of the Real
If Chloe in the Afternoon is a fantasized autobiography of Rohmer, it is also a self-criticism, the most lucid possible. In it, the director represents himself in the figure of a petit bourgeois (Frédéric) who leads a well-regulated life with his wife, his children, and his office. He surrounds himself with pretty secretaries and spends more and more amorous afternoons with a beautiful loser named Chloé…until he gets scared and returns, in extremis, to the conjugal home. How can we not see in this an almost transparent chronicle of Rohmer’s everyday life? Although he was somewhat older than his character, he too was a young married man raising two little boys. And he too had founded his “company”: Films du Losange, with an associate played on the screen by Daniel Ceccaldi. He too—and this is the main thing—divided his time between evenings spent at home with his family, working in his office, and empty stretches: the ones he spent in the metro and on buses, inventing adventures for himself. Or afternoons spent talking, over a cup of tea, with young women who were virtually (borderline) actresses. On the one hand, real life, under the name of Maurice Schérer, with all its weight of tenderness, fidelity, and obligations, and on the other the dream life, under the sign of Éric Rohmer, in which adolescence is prolonged through meetings with women that never have any consequences. And without these two parallel arcs having the slightest chance of intersecting.
“You’ve never dreamed of living two lives at the same time, simultaneously but in a complete and perfect way?” “That’s impossible.” “It’s a dream.” This dialogue between Frédéric and Chloé inaugurates a theme that was to run through all of Rohmer’s subsequent work. Up to that point, the crucial question (which was to remain crucial right to the end) was that of the choice: Françoise or Maud? Laura or Claire? Starting with Chloe in the Afternoon, it was accompanied by a utopia of doubling, as developed in Full Moon in Paris and Triple Agent: a mad hope of escaping the limits of the conjugal bond, of identity, as if one could be several persons at once. Not the temptation of adultery in the classic, boulevard-comedy sense of the term. In Frédéric’s flirtation with Chloé, we divine a tacit contract that prescribes the impossibility of a conclusion, as in the filmmaker’s light-hearted gallantries with the creatures who passed through Films du Losange. We have seen it in the romantic episode with Irène Skoblin and also in the more nefarious episode with Béatrice Romand: if Rohmer liked to play with others’ desires or with his own, that was only in order to reaffirm his attachment to his wife, as well as an inalienable free will.
To be sure, we could discuss (and people have not failed to do so) the gap between the logos and the libido, as it is manifested more obviously than ever in Frédéric. And of course we can only be impressed by the sequence in which Frédéric races down a staircase to avoid risking a carnal union with Chloé. Especially since on this occasion Rohmer uses a Hitchcockian high-angle shot the better to emphasize his alter ego’s panic. But at the same time he reveals a profound truth that is in any case his own and that of his characters: the idea that “freedom expresses itself by limiting itself,”61 that among the profusion of possibilities and the choice of the One, there is a necessary balance through which it is important to safeguard one’s mental health—and certainly one’s freedom. What Frédéric is fleeing when he runs away from Chloé is perhaps less carnal sin than the threat of being caught in a trap, confiscated by the other, torn away from his position of an eternal dreamer. By taking refuge in the arms of his wife, he recovers the right to construct castles in the air, as the verses from La Fontaine soon to be quoted as an epigraph to A Good Marriage put it. And as is magnificently suggested, as the couple slips away to make “love in the afternoon,” by the final panoramic shot of a window.
If Rohmer reveals himself here more than in any of his other films, as one might expect, he does not do so without modesty or reservations. Or without hesitations, as Pierre Cottrell testifies: “Where he lost his grip a bit was in the organization of the shooting: it didn’t go smoothly, as usual. At certain points he said: ‘No, we’ll stop there for today.’ It was probably connected with the subject of the film.”62 This uneasiness reached its apex when he had to film the erotic sequence between Chloé and Frédéric. He began by arranging the naked body of his actress on the bed. He blushed with embarrassment and went to find his male lead, Bernard Verley, and asked him to do it for him. Once it was done, Rohmer was heard to cough from the upper floor, to which he had retreated: “It’s fine like that!” Verley recalled that:
Leslie Caron was visiting the set, and she died laughing. He had put himself in the position of a voyeur, whereas he had every right to occupy that of the director…During the whole shoot, he was very cool toward me, even though he had earlier been quite warm. It was only when the last shot was done that I saw him relax: “How are you?” For a moment, he had projected some aspect of himself onto me. I was his double to some extent.63
To make Bernard Verley his double, and thus avoid making the confession too obvious, Rohmer developed a strange strategy. Faithful to his taste for following people around, for the “position of a voyeur” his actor talks about, he spread a vast spiderweb all around the latter. First, by consulting a rich collection of images of him put together by Pierre Cottrell’s wife, who worked for Paris Match: photos of him on television, in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon, the day of his marriage, and so on. What was it he found so attractive in Bernard Verley? It was certainly the “rather mad” side he had stressed in his letter to Béatrice Romand, combined with a massive physique that resembled that of the Gaullist minister Olivier Guichard. A mixture of romanticism and banality that went well with the character’s ambivalence. Thus Rohmer was to spy on the actor, observe his habits in the bars of the Saint-Germain quarter, and especially in the Café de Flore (where he was a member of the “Pouilly Club”). As soon as Verley agreed to play the role of Frédéric, everything was done to make him see in it not a role but a pure and simple continuation of himself. Rohmer took him to the ninth arrondissement and showed him a building: “This is where your office is.” One morning he asked Verley to meet him at 7 A.M. in a café across the street from the Saint-Lazare railway station. Treated like a regular customer, Rohmer asked Verley: “Do you see that escalator going down into the station? Among the people who are going to take it, you’ll see three blonde women, one after another. You have to go down the escalator among them, if possible in the third position, in front of the third one.” Prepared in this way, the scene was filmed the next morning by Rohmer with his little 16 mm camera. According to Verley, these young women had been spotted earlier by Rohmer and were completely unknown to him. According to Cottrell, Rohmer recruited a woman who was only apparently unknown to him, Tina Michelino, who was supposed to be surreptitiously filmed by the young assistant camera operator Philippe Rousselot. However that may be, Rohmer’s obsession was satisfied: he had thrust his actor into a lie that looked for all the world like truth.
Four months before filming began, the scenario of Chloe in the Afternoon (the only one of his Moral Tales that Rohmer did not take from a preexisting short story) was finally ready. But there was still some uncertainty regarding the actress who was going to play Frédéric’s wife. Rohmer remained evasive on this subject until one day he told Verley: “I’ve seen photos of your wife, she could act in the film…with your daughter, maybe?” Verley: “She’s just a kid!” Rohmer: “At her age she won’t understand.” And even if Françoise Verley was not an actress (she had worked as a stylist and cover girl), she only enhanced the main actor’s immersion in a familiar environment. Not without a slight discomfort: when she appeared on the television program Aujourd’hui madame after the film was released, she took pains to distinguish her real-life marriage from the one that appeared on the screen. Bernard Verley was less categorical. Even today, in this bizarre alchemy, it is hard for him to sort out what belonged to his private life and what belonged to Rohmer’s imagination:
He was a thief who stole chances, on the lookout for the foreseen unforeseen. He had reflected at length on people’s obsessional character, on the acts they repeat, on their reactions…He took advantage of that, and also of chance, which contributed a slight difference (it was that difference that he elicited). Thus because it was hot, I was the one who suggested the detail of the sweater in which my head is framed…but I knew that in doing that, I was completely Rohmerian! He’s someone whose fiction is so strong that it coincides with reality. And who forces you to enter into his fiction while at the same time retaining your real face.64
To complete this identification, Rohmer gave Verley another partner he knew well, and with whom he had maintained for years a virtual flirtation comparable to that between Frédéric and Chloé: Zouzou, the muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. On several occasions Rohmer had already considered using her as an actress: for instance, in La Collectionneuse, before he decided on Haydée Politoff, and in Les Aventures de Zouzou, one of his numerous unrealized projects in the 1960s. It was on seeing her again in a short film made by Dennis Berry and at a New Year’s Eve dinner in 1970 that he decided to offer her the role of Chloé. An unexpected choice, because she had neither the suaveness nor the sweetness peculiar to Rohmer’s women (with the possible exception of Béatrice Romand, of whom her poise and freedom of manners reminds us). It was precisely this radical alterity that fascinated him. The fact that her presence was so jarring amid the bureaucratic grayness in which his double had been set. “I wanted there to be a clash between Frédéric and Chloé,” he explained to Jacques Siclier, “so that people would say to themselves: they don’t make a good couple, those two. I wanted to show that they weren’t made for one another. Here, the temptation has to be something surprising.”65 In this way, Rohmer finished disguising his autobiography under the mask of a documentary: a documentary on the generation that came out of May 1968, with its vague aspiration to happiness and its refusal to enter into the boxes left to them by their elders. Even more than Haydée, Chloé (from whom Zouzou also took care to distinguish herself, at least in interviews connected with the film) will remain as an almost Balzacian type. “The slut,” as the actress sums up the character. “The professional slut.”66 However, there is no trace of Balzac the preacher: Rohmer limits himself to showing, as he had in Nadja à Paris and Une étudiante d’aujourd’hui, a female model that was emerging and whose bloom must not under any circumstances be hindered.
Interiors
We have spoken of the documentary. This dimension is very present in the prologue, with its sequences showing the train trip or the stroll around the Saint-Lazare quarter (combined with an erotic reverie that anticipates Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women). As we have seen, these “stolen” shots were in fact carefully prepared, and in them Rohmer cultivated a fragile alliance of premeditation and improvisation, though he sometimes had to choose sides, notably regarding Chloé’s room. The latter is so precisely described in the scenario (with its door next to the shower, and the other one that allows Frédéric to slip away) that there could be no question of filming it anywhere but in the studio. The scenes in the office also had to be filmed in the studio, in order to avoid traffic noises and the excessive number of takes they made necessary. Nestor Almendros was not unhappy to be filming under these conditions, because they helped him cope with variations in light. He even suggested moving from one season to the other, which a natural setting would not have allowed in such a short time frame (these interior sequences were filmed in two weeks after the outside sequences, which had been finished in the fall of 1971). Rohmer was less comfortable, and this unease influenced his direction of the actors. “Even if the set was realistic,” Verley explained, “it rang a little false, because of the fictional and conventional aspect the studio involved. Rohmer would have been much cooler with Zouzou had we filmed in real settings—and she herself would have been more on the mark. I recall having made as many as fifteen takes with her!”67 That was unusual, to say the least, given Rohmer’s ethics and thriftiness.
After the success of Claire’s Knee, Columbia allied itself again with the “small business” of Losange. Making a virtue of a necessity, Rohmer transposed his maniacal verism to the Boulogne studios, as he was to do in the case of the pictorial and digital framework of The Lady and the Duke. Not without taking a secret pleasure in this trompe-l’oeil effect, this impure mixture of genres. On the one hand, he had the two secretaries played by young women who had really worked as secretaries. On the other hand, he had the office’s windows covered with enlarged photos that were supposed to represent the streets of Paris. Chloé’s room was decorated in a deliberately banal style—but the better to set off the actress’s nudity; she seems to have come straight out of one of Ingres’s paintings of a harem. At each step in the creation of his film, Rohmer thus combines illusion and reality, as if cinema allowed him to reconcile his conflicts.
A Moral Tale?
Through all these shortcuts, Chloe in the Afternoon sketches a miniature portrait of a period. A chronicle of Pompidou’s France, which was sinking into the “boredom” denounced by Pierre Viansson-Ponté at the same time that it nurtured dreams of escape in which the flare-ups of 1968 vaguely survived, confining itself in ordinary ugliness while continuing to pursue the fantasy of a beauty that rises up out of nowhere. This mirror effect was to create a certain confusion among critics, who held different views regarding the author’s intentions. Some of them (and they were many) saw in it only a defense of old values:
This chamber cinema is ultimately the equivalent of boulevard theater. A modernized boulevard, repainted and redone in accord with today’s taste, but that cannot see beyond its little bourgeois horizon, a sentimental microcosm closed in on itself, atemporal, completely cut off from reality. The qualities of the style do not make up for the vacuity of the intention, which, on the pretext of studying characters, is very comfortable with the dominant morality.68
Rohmer raises human problems in moral terms: that is the contrary of a left-wing attitude. […] In this little world, moral behavior seems to be determined solely by the characters’ will: it is a deracinated, idealist, and thus finally reactionary view.69
The moral tale becomes moralizing—and reactionary. If there is to be love in the afternoon, it will be with the missus. The fun will be conjugal or it won’t exist at all.70
These last lines were written by Jean-Louis Bory. That did not prevent him from continuing to defend Rohmer’s cinema, including on the television program Le Masque et la Plume, where Chloe in the Afternoon was the subject of a fierce debate: unlike Bory (who praised the rigor with which Rohmer developed his point of view), Pierre Billard could see only the deficiencies of the mise en scène and the cowardice of the main character. Off the record, Jean Eustache did not hesitate to express his irritation: “A man who flees a naked girl! I don’t understand it at all.” On the other hand, some commentators went into raptures over the figure of Chloé, who incarnated, in their view, a challenge to patriarchy:
Every great period of civilization is necessarily marked by feminism, and thus by eroticism […], thus by the perturbation of all values […] In this respect, Rohmer is both one of the most modern of our film directors and—perhaps without knowing it—one of those whose work is most revolutionary.71
This feminist and leftist reading gave rise to a delicious misunderstanding at the New York Film Festival, where Rohmer, making an exception to his usual rule, had gone to present his film. He was accompanied by Pierre Cottrell, who for the nonce delegated his functions as interpreter to Pierre Rissient. The latter faithfully translated the filmmaker’s remarks, to the great dismay of the woman journalist, who wanted to hear a discourse promoting the emancipation of women. She accused Rissient of distorting Rohmer’s thought, Rohmer defended his translator, and the discussion became heated. Rissient recalled: “The questions intimidated him, he began stammering, and it all got out of hand: the woman was angry, Rohmer was angry that she was angry, and I was having a good laugh.”72 There were many other interviews, especially for television, where Rohmer appeared with a small mustache that fooled no one. He greatly enjoyed this stay in America. While Zouzou was getting ready to pal around with John Cassavetes (at the Los Angeles Film Festival), Rohmer made friends with Bob Rafelson and met many other people. This effervescence was connected with the very favorable reception of Chloe in the Afternoon. It was to become the most successful of the Moral Tales in the United States.
Was this another misunderstanding? The popularity of Chloe in the Afternoon on the other side of the Atlantic seems attributable to extra cinematic grounds, the thrills and chills of adultery French style, all the more exciting because it was not consummated. In any case, that was the dimension remembered by the African-American comedian Chris Rock in his 2007 remake of the movie (under the title I Think I Love My Wife). Rohmer’s name is not mentioned anywhere in the credits, and the action is transposed into the New York business world. However, the main lines of the original scenario are respected—with one important difference: sex. Sex separates the husband and the wife because they have not made love in ages, and that makes the husband want to see what else might be on offer (even at the price of a conjugal happy ending). The 1972 film did not dot the i’s and cross the t’s as clearly, and Rohmer denied that he had intended to plead in favor of marriage or free sex. As we have said, the true theme of this last “moral tale” is more enigmatic, and that is why it has elicited so many contradictory interpretations. It is Rohmer’s most self-reflective film, the one in which he questions the powers and limits of fiction, the one in which he moves into a new position that he was soon to make his own in the Comedies and Proverbs: that of the spectator.
