Éric Rohmer’s Endless Summers

Are you having an Éric Rohmer summer? Prerequisites include: making elaborate plans to do nothing; impulsively relocating or extending your vacation; and obsessing over a lover who’s probably a waste of time. If you find yourself playing volleyball with a crush in blue, white and red color-block outfits reminiscent of the French flag, you’ve qualified. Although it would be un-Rohmerian to savor that.

The films of Rohmer are deceptively simple. Their surfaces of gorgeous scenery, filled with characters seemingly free of work or money troubles, mask a tangled web of frustrated desires and minor betrayals underneath. Often, they take the form of romances between characters who (for various reasons) refuse to sleep together, preferring to distill their erotic tension until it hangs between them in the air. (The lack of consummation can not always excuse the desires themselves, and it must be noted that many of these films feature older men lusting after younger women, sometimes coercively.) From his casting to costumes to the slightly clinical way he stages action, everything seems calculated to observe and preserve a sense of effortlessness – a paradoxical goal. Though his visual style lives on in the work of many cinematic disciples, no one else has been able to replicate Rohmer’s trademark recipe of relaxation and tension. At its height, this tone produces a very odd kind of comedy, as characters with seemingly all the time in the world refuse to live in the moment.

As Rohmer himself once put it, “My heroes, somewhat like Don Quixote, think of themselves as characters in a novel, but perhaps there is no novel.” It makes sense, then, that the director began his career as a writer before elevating his narratives to a more cinematic reality. His early novel, Élisabeth (1946), which was recently published for the first time in English, tells the story of a laconic summer holiday in 1939, and hints at Germany’s imminent invasion of France in a way that feels like a rehearsal of his later paradoxical tone. An editor of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Rohmer presided over the French New Wave’s house organ at the very moment when most of his peers – including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol – were taking the plunge into filmmaking. When he finally joined them by filming the first of his “Six Moral Tales” in 1963, he had arrived (after a few false starts) at his mature style – one in which self-determined characters are caught off-guard by the forces of coincidence and chance, so that their best laid plans come tumbling down. Though Rohmer made films for all seasons, it’s no wonder that he’s best remembered for his visions of summer, the time of year when everyone tries to break their routines long enough to enjoy the simple things in life.

La Collectionneuse (1967)

Rohmer’s first international success and the third of his “Six Moral Tales” begins with a scene that plays in the back of my mind every time I go on vacation. After parting ways with his London-bound fiancée in favor of Saint-Tropez, a gadabout art dealer named Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) arrives in the South of France with a bold plan “to carry idleness to a height I’d never yet reached.” Accustomed to working odd hours and partying until dawn, he now strives to get up early, the better to savor his own “descent into apathy.” This strong determination to do nothing is the paradox that animates all of Rohmer’s summer films, though it’s explored most explicitly in La Collectionneuse. This anti-philosophical movie gently pokes fun at people like Adrien, who believe everything in life is a matter of will.

Adrien’s quest to relax is disrupted by the arrival of Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a young woman staying in the same friend’s villa, whose idea of vacation mirrors Adrien’s workaday life: sleeping in late, staying up all night. Their bedrooms share a wall, and the lovers she brings home disrupt the art dealer’s monastic lifestyle. Soon, his disdain for her becomes a kind of obsession, mingled with attraction in ways he can’t admit. He accuses Haydée of being a collector of men, hunting for lovers the way someone else might assemble rare stamps, but this is just more willfulness on his part. After all, Adrien is the one who has dedicated a career to sourcing and evaluating one-of-a-kind objects. Haydée, it seems, merely lives in the moment, doing exactly what she wants when she wants. His feverish theories about her motivations and schemes create an escalating tension as the two picnic, sunbathe and dine by the water. After all, if Haydée is a collectionneuse, why hasn’t she attempted to acquire him yet? 

Narrated by Adrien’s didactic voiceover and named after his interpretation of Haydée, La Collectionneuse demands its viewers watch against the grain, questioning the authority of someone who never second-guesses himself. The beautiful scenery, and the few enchanting moments when Haydée offers her perspective, become fugitive pleasures in this film, since Adrien can’t appreciate them. Like a summer’s day, the things he wants most only slip through his fingers.

Claire’s Knee (1970)

The fifth of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” Claire’s Knee arrived as the director was riding an updraft of success, and he took his rave reviews as a sign to get stranger. Set on Lake Annecy near the Swiss border, Claire’s Knee stars Jean-Claude Brialy as Jérôme, a middle-aged diplomat who is finally ready to settle down. Like Adrien, he has a fiancée he’s vacationing away from. Not exactly in love, he instead regards their union as a happy condition of fate: “We tried to avoid each other, but it was no use, so why not join forces?” Returning to Annecy to sell his childhood home, Jérôme runs into Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old friend and novelist vacationing with a local family. 

After Aurora notices that her friend’s daughter, Laura (Béatrice Romand), has a crush on Jérôme, she entices him to reciprocate so that she’ll have something to write about. Jérôme goes along with the scheme half-heartedly – he sees no harm in it, since he considers himself immune to seduction following his engagement – but soon gets distracted, then obsessed, with Laura’s sister, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). Specifically, with the joint between the femur and tibia on Claire’s right leg.

Why a knee? It’s an unusual fetish, and Jérôme doesn’t particularly seem like a fetishist, though he speaks poetically about how “every woman has her most vulnerable point,” which can become “the magnetic pole of my desires.” Jérôme was already manufacturing a desire for Laura, the better to satisfy Aurora. Taking these triangulations into account, Rohmer seems to be pointing out how the rehearsal of desire pales in comparison to the real thing, no matter how random or inconvenient it may be. Emotions instruct action in all of his films, despite his characters’ wish to live in the world of their plans. This means that the final act of Claire’s Knee is devoted solely to Jérôme’s quest to place his hand on Claire’s knee, despite the fact that he barely knows her and doesn’t much like her otherwise. Jérôme, who considers his knee obsession as a kind of curse, must exorcise the desire to return to the world of his ideals.

Pauline at the Beach (1983)

Trading alpine lakes for the English Channel, Rohmer’s 10th feature film takes place in the tidal waters of coastal Normandy, where two women have just arrived for their vacation. The beautiful Marion (Arielle Dombasle), fleeing a recent divorce, has returned to her childhood summer home, bringing her 15-year-old cousin Pauline (Amanda Langlet) along with her. They soon reconnect with Pierre (Pascal Greggory), an old flame of Marion’s, who was about to give a windsurfing lesson to Henri (Féodor Atkine) when he spotted her. These four become a group, spending every day together, despite rising tensions between Henri and Pierre as they compete for Marion’s attention.

In a move that surely reads differently today than it did in the 1980s, Marion deflects attention by offering up Pauline. She wants her cousin to gain some “experience” this summer, and doesn’t see any harm in letting an older man seduce her. Pauline, who often seems like the most mature person in the picture, stubbornly insists that she only likes boys her own age, mostly because older men seem incapable of telling the truth. Her words prove prescient, as the two suitors both try deceiving Marion in order to win her affection. The measure of their worth (from the audience’s perspective, at least) becomes a matter of how much they can actually work against Marion’s suggestions, and treat Pauline instead as a daughter or a friend. Pierre tries to help her with an age-appropriate crush, while Henri takes a decidedly creepier approach.

One of Rohmer’s first films to decenter a male perspective, Pauline at the Beach is a unique coming-of-age story that suggests self-possession is actually something you’re born with, and must work to retain. Pauline is the hero of this film, and her simple desires and ambitions are a refreshing contrast to the febrile scheming that marks so many other Rohmerian summers. Full of gorgeous scenery and quirky minor characters, the film is best appreciated by fully investing in her perspective, and tuning out the oversexed adults fighting in the background.

A Summer’s Tale (1996)

Shot in gorgeous long takes and paced slower than his earlier works, A Summer’s Tale anticipates the more impressionistic touch of contemporary independent filmmakers like Hong Sang-soo and Mia Hansen-Love. This late work is Rohmer’s most moving summer film, trading in the angst of unmet desires in his earlier works for a delicate attention to the passage of time. When Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) arrives in the beach town of Dinard, he knows no one, and the film follows him through several scenes before he speaks. It’s only when an outgoing waitress named Margot (Langlet, 13 years after her starring role in Pauline) comes on to Gaspard that he reveals why he’s there: he has received mixed messages from his girlfriend, Léna (Aurelia Nolin), about whether she might be passing through on her vacation, and has decided to wait for her until she arrives. That’s fine for Margot – her boyfriend is away on an expedition in the South Pacific. Together, the two explore Brittany’s beaches and bluffs as a platonic couple that seems forever on the brink of romance.

Margot is an ethnographer who has made a home in Dinard to study the Breton and Newfoundlander communities there. Gaspard is a mathematician who composes music to get out of his head. Both characters embody versions of Rohmer’s career-long creative obsessions: his clinical interest in exploring the regions of France; and his habit of pairing and dividing romantic partners in his films as though they were variables in an equation. Long obsessed with creating parallel tales or symmetrical narrative features, and often grouping his projects in structured series, Rohmer may have created his most enduring self-portrait in the aloof and cerebral Gaspard. He is also the first male character in a film by the director that I would want to spend time with, one who is not merely a victim of his own self-important delusions. 

Which is not to say Gaspard has it all figured out: Confused by Margot, he moves on to another local girl, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), only for Léna to finally show up. Now he has three women to juggle, all of whom he’s promised to take to the island of Ouessant. Margot, who has openly encouraged his affairs, seems to be the only one he really connects with. But what about the boyfriend she claims she still loves? A Summer’s Tale keeps Gaspard in a place of torturous indecision far longer than other Rohmer films, but he is only the latest in a long line of protagonists to have his ideas about fate upended by chance. Eventually, he finds an exit, though his goodbye with Margot stands as one the most charged and enduring of Rohmer’s unconsummated summer romances.