Criterion Prediction #282: Comedies & Proverbs: The Aviator’s Wife, A Good Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris, The Green Ray, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, by Alexander Miller
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Titles:Comedies & Proverbs – The Aviator’s Wife, A Good Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris, The Green Ray, Boyfriends and Girlfriends
Synopsis: Six films from Eric Rohmer from 1981, to 1987 that capture the vulnerabilities and sardonic foibles of romance from a variety of perspectives.
Critique: Amidst the trenchant mire that is dating in your 30s, I thought it would be clever to include something along the lines of “doesn’t play games” in one of my online dating profiles. I met someone and we lucked out to be long-lasting friends. She told me something that made me renege on the idea of “playing games” while dating. “Oh please, everyone plays games; that’s part of the fun. Anyone who says they don’t is kind of full of shit.” I’m paraphrasing from memory but the message and intention are intact; it was some solid advice I’ve carried with me to this day. Lately, when I think of people playing games in a romantic sense, all I can think of is the films of Rohmer, namely his six-film series Comedies and Proverbs. Of all the Rohmerian series, including Six Moral Tales and Tales of the Four Seasons, the six movies in the the Comedies and Proverbs thread feel the most related.
It opens with The Aviator’s Wife, a Rohmerian flirtation, a blithely spirited overture, where the Parisian locale emanates a tone not unlike the street epics of Jacques Rivette. This profile of jealousy, suspicion, muddled romantic motives and the bullish independence that can only come from self-assured twentysomethings holds our attention captive. It’s the ideal melding of crafty social allusion with playful emotional stakes. It’s not as engagingly frustrating, casually sexy or exciting as the following movies but, as anyone familiar with the director’s work knows, we’ll get plenty of that in the time to come.
A Good Marriage takes a concept that, at first, seems kind of silly. A woman, Sabine, played with bookish coquetry by Béatrice Romand, decides, after her affair with a married artist, that she will find a suitor and, at lass, enjoy the fruits of a good marriage. Usually, the necessary excitement of Rohmer is the adjacent energy of gorgeous people hopping or coming close to hopping into bed with one another. The prospect of A Good Marriage seems chaste yet this irony is the crux of the series. At first, Sabine at times comes off as immature but the film and Sabine present themselves to us in a way that we fall for her. The story sheds its deceptive veneer of prudishness and A Good Marriage is a showcase for the director’s sense of humor.
While A Good Marriage and The Aviator’s Wife feel like “warmups” to the likes of Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris, my personal favorite, The Green Ray and, of course, and Boyfriends and Girlfriends, feel like more present, active and substantial outings. Of course, that’s not to diminish the first two movies. It’s analogous to his Six Moral Tales; after The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne’s Career, there’s La Collectionneuseand My Night at Maud’s.
Pauline at the Beach is bildungsroman as a corollary collision course where courting and the dynamics of sexual relationships transcend age and maturity is a relative term with so much flexibility we’re not even sure if there is a breaking point. There’s the initial mislead, it’s “Pauline at the Beach” but Arielle Dombasle as Pauline’s sexy aunt Marion is emblazoned by Nestor Almendros’ ever-so-summery photography. The film is roiling with the seasonal atmosphere. You can practically feel the UV rays drying the residual salt water in your hair. It’s swimsuits, bare feet, towels and eating outside. As Marion’s doting on her younger cousin with maternal instinct, we see her flirtations and excitements reveal the mislead. It’s not long before we see Marion and Pauline are engaged in the same fumbling clumsiness of loves transactions, the enticement of sexual amusements present themselves differently but the games played aren’t unfamiliar. This is where Rohmer’s democratization of beauty hits its apex. The masculine jawline is showcased with the same affection as the feminine body in a tight swimsuit. It’s a sexy movie without the emphatic visual insistence because the interpersonal dynamics are pushy enough; Pauline at the Beach is a film that is rumbling with funny frustrations and veiny ironies and stands as one of the best in the director’s oeuvre, let alone this series.
However, it’s tied with a film I’d consider one of my favorites from the director. I remember one of my earlier romances started with all the emotional urgency as any drama; it was inaugurated with one her friends’ weddings, where I met the family and her friends teased me, “Watch out, she’s difficult.” They recalled a group trip where some nights, instead of going out, my then-girlfriend opted to stay at the hotel, watch movies and read. And this so-called warning held true in our relationship, it wasn’t uncommon for X to want her own space. She had a narrative that didn’t jive with everyone else’s. Sometimes it emerged as a source of conflict, trying to accommodate her desires while considering the feelings of those around her. But she wasn’t dishonest to herself or others. With nearly a decade removed from our breakup, I felt a pulsing communication with Delphine throughout the entirety of The Green Ray.
Rohmer gives the movie to Marie Riviére. Delphine’s tears, anxieties and uncertainties resonate with humane honesty in a way that surpasses and disarms our need to “figure her out.” I found myself recognizing that corollary needs to suffer alongside her. For the same reason, you can’t articulate your frustrations when someone can’t keep you from crying when you don’t know why you’re upset. The Green Ray is less about the romantic notions in the games we play but the miasma cultivated around a person whose identity is so their own it reduces the world around them. On the one hand, Delphine seems inconsolable and lost but she’s an individual resisting the lure of easy answers so much that her desires and aims are beyond the grasp of her peers. I chide those reviewers who find this character difficult, self-sabotaging or alienated; there’s a persistent quality of sadness but the negative connotation is the baggage we project on the character. I see and feel her as a person consumed with a beautiful sadness. It would be easy to tag someone as a tragic type but people are more complicated and remarkable than dramas. Is The Green Ray a movie about a person who can be profoundly moved by the setting sun and won’t suffer the doldrums of everyday banality? I don’t know, but it’s a powerful statement that hasn’t and likely won’t leave me.
When the credits rolled, I wrote my ex-partner, extolling the virtues of what I had just seen, recommending that she watch it; naturally, I haven’t heard back. I doubt she’s tracked it down. The paradoxical fallout is that I recommended the film to someone who I saw in the character of Delphine and, in doing so, I revealed the glaring irony of my missing the point. Almendros gets in tight with 16mm and the results are magical.
Boyfriends and Girlfriends. That’s the kind of title you’d expect to see used as a parody of an Eric Rohmer movie; of course, this is anything but.
Rohmer caps this run with what feels like the most modern of the films here. There’s a presence of 80s cleanliness. The Green Ray, and Pauline at the Beach retain this grainy immediacy, whereas this, The Aviator’s Wife and A Good Marriage, all shot by Bernard Lutic, present themselves with a veneer that doesn’t feel liable to archival chancery. The time of release indicates a segue to the director’s 90s era and one can see a way to track the aesthetic ascension from The Comedies and Proverbs to the Tales of the Four Seasons.
There’s more to the cleanliness of Boyfriends and Girlfriends than the tech or the photography; there’s the twinge of Rohmer’s casual insistence on beautiful people and it’s carried in the upwardly mobile and groomed cast. All of this is synced up with an artful literacy, making the experience of watching the film come off as a petit four summation of the five films before it. We start fashioning our little alliances, sniffing out who’s crushing on whom and why and sniffing out how it’s all going to go down, ramped up with the comedic anticipation the six films are predicated on. After all, it’s about the games we play.
Why It Belongs in the Collection: There’s a few constants in The Criterion Collection. More recently, it’s been large box sets of directors’ works (World of Wong Kar-wai and The Complete Films of Agnés Varda) but before that, it’s been keeping Rohmer’s movies in their respected collections. Six Moral Tales goes back to 2006 and more recently with this year’s release of Tales of the Four Seasons. While Arrow Academy’s Region 2 release of The Comedies and Proverbs is a stellar set, it only feels right that these films get spine numbers. After all, are we not completionists?
