Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer

Blue Jeans is one of six short films screening along with all five of Rozier’s features in Jacques Rozier: Chronicler of Summer, the landmark series opening Friday and running through August 22 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York. The five features then head to Los Angeles, where the American Cinematheque will screen them from August 31 through September 11. Late August, early September—this is the perfect spot on the calendar for a Rozier retrospective. Like most of Rozier’s movies, Blue Jeans is set during those long and languid weeks when the French abandon the daily grind and head for the coast.

Two seventeen-year-old guys on scooters go girl-hunting, and Blue Jeans captures the ambiance of late-1950s Cannes—the town, that is; the festival is never mentioned—by night and by day. Godard, one of Rozier’s crucial early champions, praised Blue Jeans in the pages of the French weekly Arts and helped Rozier set up his first feature, Adieu Philippine (1962), by introducing him to his producer, Georges de Beauregard.

Two months before Adieu Philippine premiered in Paris, Cahiers du cinéma featured a still on its cover—and then again the following year for a special issue devoted to the nouvelle vague. Godard called it “quite simply the best French film of recent years,” and Truffaut found in Rozier’s style “something of genius in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality that confers sufficient importance on them to fascinate us.”

Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini) is working as an assistant to a cameraman in a bustling television studio when he meets and latches on to Liliane (Yveline Céry) and Juliette (Stefania Sabatini), aspiring actresses whose tight friendship will eventually be tested when Michel refuses to choose between them. Erotic tension simmers, but it’s never discussed. There’s also a bit of broad comic relief in the slapdash efforts of a producer (Vittorio Caprioli) who is trying to worm his way out of paying Michel for shooting a ridiculous commercial with Liliane and Juliette dressed up as eskimos.

As evidenced in at least three of his features, Rozier, who passed away last summer, also seems to have found lugging heavy baggage up a sand dune or across otherwise hostile terrain hilarious. Intentionally or not, everyone in Adieu finds themselves regrouped in Corsica, where Michel intends to enjoy one last blowout before he reports for military service and heads off to fight in the Algerian War. There’s an unrushed and immeasurably effective melancholy in many of Rozier’s endings, playing out as long sighs of resignation to society’s demands once the holidays are over.

Near Orouët (1971) opens in a Parisian office where a small army of young women hammer away at electric typewriters and Gilbert (Bernard Ménez) darts between them, snapping orders. He clearly has his eye on one of them, Joëlle (Danièle Croisy), who is not only uninterested but also can’t wait to get away and spend a few weeks on the coast with a friend, Kareen (Françoise Guégan), and her cousin, Caroline (Caroline Cartier).

Carefree hours are whiled away with wading, shrimping, pastry-binging, and lots and lots of giggling until Gilbert just happens to show up. An uninvited threat to their vibe, he becomes the young women’s plaything, and eventually, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, a housemate. More than two hours pass in Rozier’s breeziest holiday movie before the first crack of drama, which then gives way to the long segue back home.

A “coincidence of subjective time and the film’s rhythm,” wrote Joël Magny in Cahiers in 1996, “with its surges of momentum, its stalling, its abrupt rebounds, its apparent returns to square one—of which the car ride in Adieu Philippine and the coming and going of pick-up artists in Blue Jeans are perfect examples—contributes to the impression that Near Orouët is self-evident, caught on the spot, and natural, but also to the malaise at the heart of Rozier’s cinema.”

In The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976), travel agents Jean-Arthur Bonaventure (Pierre Richard) and Bernard Dupoirier (Jacques Villeret) set up a getaway that challenges paying customers to rough it like untrained survivalists. If Near Orouët “develops a tail end reminiscent of more traditional romantic dramas,” writes Tope Ogundare for Senses of Cinema, “The Castaways of Turtle Island sheds any semblance of plot like a snake shedding its skin plus its backbone. Sure, there is a story, a sequence of events, but as Bonaventure and Bernard blindly lead their band of wannabe free spirits closer to nowhere, the narrative seems increasingly uninterested in its own end-point, and is only more thrilling for it.”

Bernard Ménez returns in Maine-Océan Express (1986) as one of several disparate characters who form an unlikely ad hoc community: A Brazilian dancer, a language-savvy lawyer, an angry sailor, two train conductors, and a brash entertainment impresario all wind up dancing a samba together in a coastal fishing village. In Maine-Océan Express, “as with its predecessors, an egalitarian space of solidarity is created as social barriers are temporarily knocked down, allowing the characters—and us—to embrace life’s unadulterated pleasures,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia for Film Comment.