Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons: Another Year

Jeanne is an unusual protagonist because she is not at the center of her own story. She is an uneasy witness to other people’s dramas, constantly feeling like an intruder as she circulates with her duffel bag of clothes among four different places: three apartments in Paris and Natacha’s country house in Fontainebleau, with its overgrown walled garden. This kind of unsettled existence is common to Rohmer’s men and women. His vacation movies—including Claire’s Knee (1970), Pauline at the Beach (1983), and The Green 
Ray (1986)—observe people away from home, liberated and disoriented by the temporariness of their arrangements. But even in their everyday lives, people are often in transit; the heroine of A Tale of Winter shuttles between her mother’s home in the suburbs and those of two men, one in Paris and one in the provincial town of Nevers. She is constantly seen riding trains, subways, and buses, or going in and out of metro stations. “It’s hard to live in two places,” says the heroine of Full Moon in Paris (1984), whose life is upended by her acquisition of a pied-à-terre. It is not that Rohmer’s people are footloose, that any place they hang their hat is home. On the contrary, it is their sensitivity to their habitats—like Jeanne’s intense discomfort with her boyfriend’s untidy flat—that keeps them moving. Rohmer often holds a shot for a beat after the people in it have exited the frame. Like pauses in a musical score, these moments are essential to the rhythm of his films, but they also quietly emphasize the action of leaving, the sense that his characters can disappear.

After all this transience, it is moving to finally meet, in A Tale of Autumn, one person deeply rooted in her home, and her land. Magali (Béatrice Romand) owns a vineyard in the Rhône Valley, where she grows organic grapes and aspires to make a Côtes du Rhône vintage that ages well. Rohmer had become increasingly concerned with ecology and conservation, themes he brings in here with tender attention to the weeds and wildflowers growing between Magali’s vines, and with debates about whether the valley’s pastoral beauty has been ruined by overdevelopment.

It is harvest time, with grapes hanging in dusty purple bunches, chrysanthemums and yellowing leaves, pale stone walls baking in golden sun. In concord with the season, this is one of Rohmer’s few films about middle-aged people. Magali and her best friend, Isabelle (Marie Rivière), are in their midforties, each with grown children, and the actors playing them both had long associations with the director. As a teenager, Romand had played the precocious Laura in Claire’s Knee, and she brings to Magali the same magnificently untamed hair and forthright, spiky charisma. Isabelle has the lanky, ambling dreaminess that Rohmer seemed to cherish in Rivière, but unlike her hypersensitive, uncertain characters in The Aviator’s Wife (1981) and The Green Ray, here she is settled in a happy marriage.

Casting was crucial for Rohmer’s process, since characters are the heart of his cinema. He often incorporated actors’ biographical details, habits, opinions, or talents into their roles (for example, Magali, like Romand, was born in French North Africa), but there were strict limits on how much leeway he gave performers to shape their own characters. Young actors often wrote to Rohmer expressing their desire to work with him, and some of these eager suitors got their wishes, including Charlotte Véry (Félicie in A Tale of Winter) and Gwenaëlle Simon (Solène in A Tale of Summer). But he relied increasingly on a trusted circle of actors and collaborators, including cinematographer Diane Baratier, editor Mary Stephen, and producers Françoise Etchegaray and Margaret Ménégoz. Both behind the scenes and in his films, he chose more and more to immerse himself in a community of women. By the time he made A Tale of Summer, he confessed that returning to a male protagonist made him somewhat uncomfortable: “Who can say? I don’t know—have I feminized myself to that point?”

If Rohmer used romantic and sexual love in his films to examine how people choose among different paths, and how they try to make sense intellectually of the vagaries of physical attraction, what role does friendship play? Films that revolve around female friends (male friendships don’t seem to have interested Rohmer much) allow him to explore not what brings people together, or breaks them apart, but how they exist together. Platonic relationships can be fraught with misunderstandings, jealousies, hurt feelings, and emotional reunions, like Jeanne and Natacha’s. Or they can age like good wine, as Magali and Isabelle’s has, gaining both mellowness and complexity. “Friendship is serious,” Solène says in A Tale of Summer. “Maybe more than love.”

Yet Rohmer’s people rarely forget l’amour for long. The stubborn, idealistic Magali, who says that work has become her “sole passion,” is an instantly recognizable type: the vibrantly attractive, accomplished woman who is alone because, as she herself puts it, “I want a man, but under a host of conditions!” Piqued by her refusal to seek out love, both Isabelle and Rosine (Alexia Portal), the girlfriend of Magali’s son, Léo (Stéphane Darmon), separately plot to set her up. It is hard to say which of their schemes is more shockingly harebrained. Rosine’s is entangled with her efforts to end a romantic relationship with her high-school philosophy professor. Meanwhile, Isabelle places a personal ad for her friend, a well-meaning betrayal both of Magali—who recoils from the idea of a “petite annonce”—and of Gérald (Alain Libolt), the gentle and civilized man Isabelle proceeds to meet and date, posing as her friend. (In doing so, she also risks betraying her husband, since she enjoys being courted by Gérald.)

A Tale of Autumn recalls the sparkling Hollywood romantic comedies Rohmer loved as a young movie critic—though, as with all his films, the humor does not reside in funny lines or performances but in situations and ironies—and also resembles Shakespeare’s comic tales of mistaken identities and blundering machinations. It all comes together at the outdoor wedding of Isabelle’s daughter, a communal celebration where the two matchmaking plots converge. There is some awkwardness and confusion, some rudeness and disappointment. But there is no bitterness, no sting; the warmth and ripeness that pervade the film take off the sharp edges, without blurring any of the complications.

It is not quite true to say that Rohmer’s films do not judge their characters. In a sense, they do nothing else, lucidly cataloging people’s rationalizations, self-deceptions, and insensitive lapses. But his films also go far beyond mere tolerance for human foibles. The wellspring of Rohmer’s art is his fascination with how people think, with the impossible yet irresistible quest to understand ourselves and others. What interested him in cinema, he said, was “the secret of beings” and “the mystery of subjectivity.” This enigma is the source of moral philosophy, narrative art—and gossip. In order to isolate and study the subject, Rohmer, like a scientist conducting an experiment, eliminates the noise. He sets aside many of the things that impinge on our lives—like money, politics, sickness, and death—creating a fantastical yet strangely lifelike world. He filmed in real streets, landscapes, and buildings with a graceful, unforced attention to the details of living spaces and everyday behavior, creating environments so deceptively ordinary that it’s easy to ignore what is unreal about them. This is a France in which hardly anyone smokes and no one ever talks about movies, where people—almost invariably beautiful and young—have time to think and talk only about what really matters: who they are, and whom they love.

Time and Tide

“Everything was planned,” actor Melvil Poupaud recalled of the making of A Tale of Summer. “Eric had calculated the schedules of the tides, the statistics of the sun; he had scouted the sites years in advance.” As with casting, Rohmer’s treatment of locations, weather, and natural phenomena was an alchemical mixture of chance and control.

For both A Tale of Summer and A Tale of Winter, Rohmer returned to a favorite narrative device, dividing the films into short chapters introduced by on-screen dates. In his vacation films, the dates become countdowns, constant reminders of the finite span of the holidays, even as they mark out idle, unstructured time. Gaspard (Poupaud) knows exactly when he must leave the coastal town in Brittany where he is vacationing, and the dates also serve as a relentless reminder of the late arrival of Léna (Aurélia Nolin), the “sort-of” girlfriend he is expecting to meet. In A Tale of Winter, the countdown is to the end of the year—and, as it turns out, to a holiday miracle. Within these strict chronological schemes, time ebbs and flows. A Tale of Summer opens with a long, wordless sequence in which Gaspard arrives alone in a sunny, crowded seaside town, settles into his borrowed room, wanders along the beach eating ice cream, and noodles on the guitar. The smoothest of jump cuts moves us between each of these fragmentary scenes, like a stone skipping over the surface of a pond; the result is a languid mood with an undertone of anxiety.

By Rohmer’s own account, this was an unusually personal film. It was based on events he had experienced or witnessed in his adolescence, he said—with his habitual secrecy, he would be no more specific than that. Gaspard is a ruefully candid self-portrait of the artist as a young man: insecure, self-absorbed, and nervously opportunistic. Poupaud, with his mop of dark curls, makes Gaspard just the sort of shyly handsome, willing but not forward boy who might be picked up by bolder women—as he is by the warm, outgoing Margot (Amanda Langlet) and the brazenly assertive Solène. He tacks back and forth between them, confiding in Margot and enjoying the novelty of a (mostly) platonic friendship with a woman, and then letting himself be instantly seduced by Solène. When the blond, arrogantly superior Léna finally shows up, he is plunged into even deeper confusion as she greets him with affection one day and treats him with brutal disdain the next.

Through it all, Gaspard clings to his music, using it to ward off other commitments. The film is buoyed by songs: sea chanteys, folk tunes, and pop, all about traveling to far-off places, the restless urge to wander to the ends of the earth. But aside from a ferry ride and an afternoon sail in the cyan waters off Saint-Malo, Gaspard never goes anywhere—especially not to the island of Ouessant, which becomes a geographical symbol of the choice he must make, as he clumsily manages to promise each of the three women that he will take her there. Margot berates him for hedging his bets; she is right, but she is also jealous and sending wildly mixed signals. Although Rohmer insisted that his own close relationships with women were based on a principle of “absolute chastity,” in his films men and women never find it easy to be just friends. They complain of blurry boundaries, feel stifled when the possibility of seduction is removed, and can’t resist flirting a little. Gaspard says he can only be himself with Margot, that with the other girls he is playing a part. It’s easier with a friend than with a lover, she agrees, moments before they start kissing.

How will he get out of his bind? Gaspard believes in luck, in letting serendipity guide his path. “A habit of coincidence? Quite a system,” Margot responds skeptically. But Rohmer’s characters are always doing this kind of thing, looking for signs or playing games with their own invented rules, the way Jeanne grants Igor three requests—to sit next to her, to hold her hand, to kiss her—but no more, and tells him afterward that she acquiesced because of the power of the number three. Do they really believe in surrendering to chance, or do they use signs to justify choices they’ve already made? In A Tale of Winter, Félicie uses this coin-flipping approach to make up her mind about whether to move in with her boss and lover, Maxence (Michel Voletti), only to recognize later the mistake of making a decision “just to decide.” Rohmer’s characters also talk incessantly about their “types,” using the claim of certainty regarding their tastes to pare down their options. To believe in types is, in a way, to believe in predestination, the other side of the coin from the flirtation with chance. Félicie becomes Rohmer’s ultimate avatar of faithfulness to one’s destiny, concluding, “There are no good or bad choices. Choice shouldn’t enter into it.”

A Tale of Winter begins in summer and back in Brittany, condensing a vacation romance into a montage of almost cloyingly idyllic scenes. Félicie and Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) frolic on beaches, in bedrooms, and on country lanes, their bliss as unvaried as the sunshine. Set five years before the main action of the film, this prologue is summer remembered in winter, and it makes the damp, gray Parisian December that much drearier by contrast. Félicie has lost Charles through the most random and foolish of accidents—she wrote the wrong town when she gave him her address—and this finding and losing of true love has become the central story of her life, endlessly rehashed and interrogated. A Tale of Winter is in many ways a companion piece to My Night at Maud’s (1969), sharing both its seasonal setting and its concern with faith, choice, chance, and grace. Félicie and her sometime boyfriend Loïc (Hervé Furic), a cultured librarian and devout Catholic, discuss Pascal’s wager, which also featured prominently in the earlier film. She is not religious, yet following an epiphany in an empty church she embraces her faith in betting on infinite happiness—that is, a reunion with Charles—rather than settling for security or practicality.

In pursuing this conviction, Félicie treats both of the men in her life horribly, abandoning Maxence two days after moving in with him, and not only leaning on the rejected Loïc for friendship and support but asking him to pray for her to get what she wants most—Charles. There are times when one wants to tell her to grow up, to abandon the fantasy of a perfect love and appreciate what a kind, loyal, intelligent man Loïc is, even if he is not her “type.” But while My Night at Maud’s embraces ambivalence toward its protagonist’s path not taken, A Tale of Winter sides wholeheartedly with its heroine, who movingly defends her gamble by saying, “Not everyone lives with hope.”

Rohmer built the film around his fascination with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and he embeds a performance of it, which moves Félicie to tears. (Originally, Rohmer hoped to cast Françoise Fabian, the unforgettable Maud, as Queen Hermione and Jean-Claude Brialy, the smugly self-deluding protagonist of Claire’s Knee, as King Leontes, which would have made for a vertiginously self-reflexive mise en abyme. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.) Like all of Shakespeare’s late romances, the play deals with grace and the miraculous restoration of what was lost. Leontes, who destroys his family with false accusations of infidelity, is granted unearned forgiveness and the return of the wife and daughter he believed dead; Félicie, guilty of a thoughtless slip of the pen, sits down opposite her long-lost love on a city bus. Charles, a blameless Leontes, regains both a lover and a daughter, Elise, he never knew he had.

It is this five-year-old who gets the last word, repeating her mother’s explanation that she is shedding “tears of joy,” a phrase that alludes to Blaise Pascal’s rapturous description of a religious experience. Transposing theology to the realm of earthly love is a typically radical move for Rohmer, embedded within a subtle grace note. It is moments like this that give his films their long finish; they linger and grow richer in the mind. To love them is to love thinking about them, and to think about them is to love thinking.