Rohmer and Løchen in Brooklyn
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Writing earlier this year about Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons cycle, Imogen Sara Smith noted that A Tale of Autumn (1998) “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.” Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and Rosine (Alexia Portal) separately devise schemes to find a match for Magali (Béatrice Romand), who spends her days tending her vineyard in the Rhône Valley.
Naturally, the schemes collide. “There is some awkwardness and confusion,” writes Smith, “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.” In 1999, Jonathan Rosenbaum made the case for A Tale of Autumn as the “last and best” film in the cycle. “The crafty way the storytelling keeps us guessing about everything—not only events and outcomes, but motives and concealed feelings—suggests that realism is as much a construction as any other sort of fiction.”
On Tuesday, Amnesiascope, the monthly screening series that Film Stage managing editor Nick Newman launched this past spring, and Rohmer Fits, one of the greatest sartorial accounts on Instagram, will present A Tale of Autumn at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. Later that same evening, Newman and Norwegian film scholar Nora Kruse will host an extremely rare screening of The Chasers (1959), directed by the Norwegian jazz musician Erik Løchen, who would eventually become the artistic director of Norsk Film. His grandson, Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), calls him “a great film talent.”
The Chasers, sometimes referred to as The Hunt, was the first of Løchen’s two features, and it premiered in competition in Cannes. “Favorably recalling the experimental narrative strategies of Alain Robbe-Grillet,” writes Acquarello, The Chasers dissects a love triangle in the wake of a fatal hunting accident. A narrator interrogates a woman, her husband, and her former (and perhaps current) lover. Acquarello notes that the “inscrutable trio’s informal testimonies begin to organically diverge, veer off in stream-of-consciousness tangents, be willfully suppressed, entangled in fanciful imagination, or become occluded in the haze of imperfect memory and subsumed desire, collapsing the planes of memory and imagination to a singularity where truth becomes malleable, and reality itself becomes as ephemeral as a waking dream.”
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