Eric Rohmer: Blueprints for a Brilliant Oeuvre

Back in 1962, Rohmer was smarting from the failure of Le signe du Lion. Hence, his decision to make these two short films. As with all the other Moral Tales, they were based on stories written by Rohmer and produced by Les Films du Losange, with Barbet Schroeder (who also plays the protagonist in Bakery Girl) as director of production. 

The twenty-three-minute-long Bakery Girl of Monceau is set near le parc Monceau and the Villiers metro station, in a well-to-do part of northwestern Paris (which also happens to be where the offices of Les Films du Losange were located). As the film carefully shows, the area combines the familiar Parisian iconography of wide, leafy boulevards lined with prosperous buildings and café terraces—the classic New Wave decor for amorous encounters—with more populous, narrower streets housing markets and food shops, including the bakery around which the action revolves. This class dichotomy is mirrored in the two female characters: the tall, blonde, and artistic Sylvie (Michèle Girardon) and the short, dark baker’s assistant Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier). The plot involves an unnamed law student (Schroeder) falling for Sylvie after glimpsing her in the street. Just as he literally bumps into her, she disappears. While looking for her through the quartier, he notices the pretty Jacqueline in the bakery. Although he considers Sylvie “so superior,” he begins an elaborate erotic ritual with Jacqueline, buying an increasing number of cakes and finally asking her out. He unceremoniously dumps her, however, as soon as Sylvie reappears. Bakery Girl thus perfectly illustrates Rohmer’s master plan for Six Moral Tales,as he recounted in a 1986 Positif interview: “While the narrator is looking for a woman, he meets another one, who occupies his affection until he finds the first woman again.”

Sylvie, it turns out, lives opposite the baker. Immobilized by a broken leg, she saw the student’s activities from her window—a neat example of the importance of the gaze in Rohmer’s films but also a mark of its often deliberately confusing quality. The director refrains from revealing whether she understood the student’s sadistic game with Jacqueline, or whether she thought he was simply looking for her. A similar ambiguity characterizes the treatment of the protagonist, the perfect bourgeois cad seducing a working-class girl for his amusement, in the tradition of nineteenth-century literature. Rohmer here adopts the modernist posture of the New Wave filmmaker as “entomologist,” observing his wicked human specimen from an ironic, quasi-scientific distance—exposing his arrogance with pronouncements such as “What upset me was not that she liked me but that she’d think there was any way I’d like her.” But Rohmer also narrates the tale through his hero’s visual point of view and oral narration. Jacqueline has our moral sympathy against the student’s machinations, but our filmic identification is with him, the women never seeming more than the objects of his desire. And yet, the charm and humor of the film mean that Rohmer never comes near the cynicism of Chabrol’s similar seduction games in Les cousins (1959). (Also typical of the New Wave is Rohmer’s use of friends from the film world as bit players. The student protagonist’s narrator voice is dubbed by the future filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier; his friend/confidant Schmidt is played by Fred Junck, who would become curator of the Luxembourg Cinémathèque; and the film critic Michel Mardore plays a customer in the bakery.)

Closer to Les cousins thematically, Suzanne’s Career, at fifty-five minutes, is an elaboration on the themes of The Bakery Girl of Monceau, as well as its ambiguities. Located in the cafés and hotels of the Latin Quarter, Suzanne’s Career deals with two bourgeois students, the cynical Guillaume (Christian Charrière) and his shy friend Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen, the narrator), and their relationship to Suzanne (Catherine Sée), a young woman who works during the day to pay for her evening classes. Guillaume outrageously exploits Suzanne financially and sexually, while Bertrand—a more developed version of Schroeder in Bakery Girl—watches with a mixture of awe and disgust meant to duplicate that of the spectator. Though less marked, the class and physical dichotomy operating here is similar to that of Bakery Girl, with the down-to-earth Suzanne being contrasted with the beautiful and exotic Sophie (Diane Wilkinson), whom both Guillaume and Bertrand desire. Suzanne is given more screen time and dialogue than Jacqueline in the other film, but her behavior and language seem designed to reinforce the misogyny of the men: she repeatedly lets herself be humiliated and exploited and hardly reacts to Guillaume’s barbs (such as, “If I had good taste, I would not like you”), and she forgives both men for abandoning her at a nightclub to which she paid the admission. She does have her moment of triumph at the end, however. Broke and dismissed by Guillaume, she disappears, to later return radiantly happy, married to the rich and dashing Frank (Patrick Bauchau). Yet here, too, ambiguities prevail. As the envious Bertrand watches, Frank complacently caresses Suzanne’s body poolside, and we finally understand the irony of the title: as she has earlier abandoned her job, Suzanne’s “career” is, basically, sexual. Besides, will Frank be another version of Guillaume? Suzanne’s Career, like Bakery Girl, cleverly plays hide-and-seek with the spectator, keeping crucial scenes offscreen—we never know for sure, for example, if it was Suzanne or Guillaume who stole some money Bertrand had hidden in a book (though we suspect Guillaume).

In both films, Rohmer subtly oscillates between a celebration and a critique of his protagonists. As he put it in a 1965 Cahiers article, “I am a man [. . .] and my tales are stories told in the first person.” He does, however, increase the agency of his female characters as he advances through the Moral Tales, and would do so even more in the Comedies and Proverbs and Tales of the Four Seasonscycles in the eighties and nineties. With such films as Full Moon in Paris (1984) and The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer indeed can be said to develop into a major author of “women’s films.” But even in Six Moral Tales, he becomes increasingly critical of the weakness of his heroes, especially their tendency to opt for the blander, “safer” women over the more lively and sexually active “darker” women. In this respect, The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Sylvie over Jacqueline) and Suzanne’s Career (Sophie over Suzanne) prefigure most clearly the choices made by the heroes of My Night at Maud’s and Love in the Afternoon.

The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career anticipate Rohmer’s later work in other ways too: the “involuntary” realism of the location shooting offers an invaluable archive of early-sixties Paris and of the behavior of social sets that have vanished or significantly changed (students wearing suits and ties!), in the same way that his later series obliquely yet tellingly document the appearance and mores of eighties and nineties France. The two earlier films also herald Rohmer’s unparalleled ability to construct complex and absorbing stories out of seemingly banal characters and undramatic situations. Although he said, “We must show what is beyond behavior, while knowing that we can only show behavior,” his is a cinema of behavior that also delves into psychological complexity. For Rohmer, the “moral tale” was “not a moralistic tale but a story that describes not just what people do but what goes through people’s minds while they do it.” In this respect as in others, The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career are the fascinating first manifestations of the glorious series of films with which Rohmer carved out his unique place in cinema.