This is from the interview I referred to yesterday regarding Isabelle Huppert. She's being interviewed by a young man, "one of fashion's fiercest, most fascinating talents," the magazine has it,
INTERVIEWER Excuse me for saying so but I think - and it isn't just in film but fashion as well - all this craziness in order to walk on the red carpet for fifteen minutes. I don't know.
HUPPERT And finally to the detriment of people's personalities!
INTERVIEWER Is this essentially an American phenomenon?
HUPPERT I suppose so. Let's say international, but mostly American.
And,
INTERVIEWER I find that unfortunately there are some American actresses who do not know how to dress at all. We feel that they are well 'surrounded' but that's not very interesting -
HUPPERT I agree. (Laughing)
Even before Rohmer's women receive a consideration, in Anglo-American criticism, a few commonplaces about Rohmer the man, Rohmer the artist, and Rohmer the filmmaker are in order. First of all the poetry of his landscapes must be ignored. Second of all, there must be a scratching of the head why Rohmer's characters aren't so full of the kinds of psychological acuities to be found in Ingmar Bergman's characters.
We all know what those are like: pointing out the true psychological core of our intimates, during conversation, a kind of expressed brutality foisted upon a passive's generosity and necessary patience, as they withhold theirs, a barely suppressed series of emotional eruptions, as a result, all in a claustrophobic, overwrought atmosphere where the nature appears dark, the city surreal, the society nowhere. Strange how alternatives and options don't arise for these characters with money. Rohmer's characters are aware there are amorous, sensual options, none the least within the imagination. With Bergman's conception, which appears like a world on the brink of a complete absence of faith, an individual must take the intense pressure of psychological-acuity-as-truth with intelligence, otherwise the sense of an impending, disastrous loss of social status might appear earned. A consideration of Rohmer never fails to mention his Catholicism. A consideration of Bergman assumes he's primarily a secular artist. But it should be obvious, after watching Persona or Scenes from a Marriage, that the Inquisitor is now within our hands.
What W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and Éric Rohmer all have in common, as artists, is a long gestation period where they went, for all intents and purposes, largely silent. Each hit upon their stride in their forties. The truth they discovered is global. An attenuation of an abundance of affectations meets the passivity of every moment where the poetic selects fruition out for use. This blending of gestation and momentary fruition, which is to be found in Sebald's poems on eyes, Carson, generally speaking, in her religious skepticism, is what is the subject of Frank O'Hara's poem, the one which soberly begins, "The only way to be quiet is to be quick..."
Any religion worth considering is based on the tyranny of selection: when you choose one image, one soul, one way, one path, another will go ignored. Rohmer's most compelling characters, men and women alike, are very much aware of this fact. That's why it would appear he has an obsession with characters in their twenties and thirties. That's when the tyranny of selection is at its most intense; that's when it forms you. Any individual that emerges from this intense tyranny of selection period with the poetics of ambiguity in tact has the makings of an erotic poet.
You don't need artistic, creative intentions, but it helps. The natural, attractive glamour of men and women requires time. An intensity of purpose would ruin on a natural glamour. A "male gaze" would bother only those who have never really been subjected to it, or if they have, don't really know what to do when objectified. As if Rohmer filming, picking out actresses and returning to preferred ones over time isn't objectifying. It is, because his films are already in the past. The poetic environment he has established defeats a timely sensation, superceding each one. Whereas Shakespeare had to disburse actual speech into a tapestry of poetic effects to convey his global vision, Rohmer simply inverted the process by harnessing the visual to an assumed verbal tapestry.
An example of the way Rohmer's poetry works can be found in the opening moments of La Collectionneuse. Two women, one man, are sitting outdoors. Immediately you hear the man in the background saying, "Perhaps style is more important than beauty..."
One of the two women present isn't convinced. "We love someone because we find him handsome," she says directly to the other woman, not the man, who is clearly handsome. "For me, an ugly man has no charm. Nothing's possible. It's over immediately."
Setting aside the psychological circumstances that requires her views being made explicit, which the impact is made immediate, by Rohmer, we're made curious about the implicit of this woman's views; but what primarily emerges, at the end of the discussion, is the sound of the arbor being amplified with the music of birds, what will outlast these particular views, any particular view, as two lovers are seen heading off on a stroll.
Personally these views of the woman excite me to no end. I would love to be objectified by a woman, but only by one that's not a feminine moron. For instance, one who would use "male beauty" as no more than a substitute for the promise of economic security, or what status she can't very well create for herself; or has it, for crissakes, but continues to be confused about what's at the root of it, a series of compromises, for instance, that have forwarded her front and center. Similarly, a convincing, credible appreciation for male beauty is what drew me into Anne Carson's world when I first read her in the late nineties, when she writes, amusingly,
"Loyal to nothing my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age and the divorce decree came in the mail? Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. Beauty makes sex sex. You if anyone grasp this - hush, let's pass."
A sure fire barometer on whether the viewer or critic understands Rohmer's poetic conception can be measured by how he or she views the Marie Rivière of Le Rayon Vert and La Femme de l'aviateur. Invariably the Anglo-American reception finds her a self-absorbed nuisance who doesn't know how to make up her mind. That response is as foregone as Hollywood production values. Not too many other works of art I can think of render more beautifully and sacred a young woman's intelligent resistance to the tyranny of selection. As for the very last moment of Le Rayon Vert, many find it momentarily redemptive. I wish I could see it that way, but like the Japanese poets I only see beauty as a temporary phenomenon. Still, that scene is incredibly moving, but not as moving as the moment in the train station when Rivière finally recognizes the opportunity to speak, as she would ordinarily do with herself.
It's impossible to choose one of Rohmer's women over the others through which to turn the prism and see his conception whole. Rohmer's conception is such that he teaches you to appreciate those women you would ordinarily be inclined to dislike intensely, which for me is the Charlotte Véry of Conte d'Hiver. Now there's someone who is truly self-absorbed; but with Rohmer being as generous as he is, he populates her world with people who accept her dreadful, bourgeois limitations for what they are, a man who loves her despite these faults, an outstanding mother whose wisdom appears to have gone lost on the offspring. That I feel a touch of tenderness for Véry at the end of the film, which in other hands I would resist with all my imaginative might, is a large part of what makes Rohmer for me one of only a handful of supreme artists. The same goes with Rohmer's Arielle Dombasle. I am inclined to ignore everything about her but her body, but even here he broadens the range.
The Zouzou of L'Amour l'après-midi, of course, is completely captivating, the 1970s Dorothy Hamill hairstyle bringing back so many awful little grammar school memories notwithstanding. With her you have one of Rohmer's outstanding devices: a character who would appear a main one appearing, rather, like a dream, a peripheral consideration to the actual main character, mainly because we never get to see that character in a private world separate from the main narrative thrust, which in this case is Bernard Verley's ongoing doubts about marriage imported into one, despite an unambiguous affection for his wife. The last scene in this film mirrors the one of Le Rayon Vert, equally one of the most affecting in all of film, yet like that, equally ambiguous (the Anglo-American, bourgeois response naturally has it as the affirmation of marriage, rather than as a reaffirmation of one only).
I wish there had been more of Aurora Cornu, she of a withering, fatigued, unyielding, yet passive intelligence that has settled beautifully around the eyes. Another supreme device of Rohmer's can be seen through her in Le Genou de Claire. Occasionally those alternative narratives taking place which we can't see, for the sake of a film's coherence, erupts into the world of a glance. With Cornu it's done brilliantly in a scene where she describes the pursuit of, and the attainment of, physically attractive young men, mainly for the purpose of populating her novels with psychological plausibility. As a character, throughout the film, she's possessed of a very seductive, yet detached sense of sexual and intellecual poise. When it's as poised as this, either in film or life, I wouldn't believe it for a moment; the role of women in society may have been revolutionized, but the need for at least a touch of tenderness, I don't see that ever changing as long as we remain, as a species, within this evolutionary phase.
There's a moment in the film where, completely out of character, we receive - it's given - a glimpse of Cornu's cleavage. I find this one of the most erotic moments in all of Rohmer's oeuvre. As for the scene with the novelist's lack of plausibility, it begins when we hear her say of men, "Since I can't have them all I prefer to do without any." Any woman that would actually believe this, good on to her, though I would find it hardly believable, especially with any character as intelligent and sensitive as Cornu's.
The outstanding Jean-Claude Brialy - a piece of male beauty Cornu uses throughout the film - responds to this piece of bluster with, "That's quite unnatural, and quite immoral." She responds to his disbelief, a defense of a momentary lapse of plausibility, really, by way of explaining there's no way she'd ever take the first clown that comes along her way. And as the camera frames her like a confessional chamber, we hear of her pursuit of young men. A vulnerability breaks through, which suggests that, in addition to her implausibility, we're now receiving the inauthenticity of the tale; the vulnerable woman, which is broached but shall remain inviolate, is one of the finest moments in the oeuvre too.
It's very subtly done, and I think only males who know how not to press on the vulnerability would be able to notice it. A lot of Anglo-American critics find Brialy's character a cretinous one, but in between the quality of relations between mature adults and the hazardous one between maturity and innocence is the loss of virginity. Young individuals can be involved in sexual relationships and still be in need of the sexually charged, psychologically mature phase, which most young men are just too dumb to offer. The film's charge is on that tease between maturity and innocence those of us who are honest, especially those of us who have been teachers, would recognize as a worthy temptation, to be that kind of instructor, outside of the national curriculum, a young beauty would never forget.
With the outstanding Béatrice Romand, I've actually seen her development within the Rohmerian conception backwards, from maturity to innocence, beginning with Conte d'automne to Le Rayon Vert to Le Beau Mariage to the young woman we see in Le Genou de Claire, so much so has the mature woman settled in my mind that as I scan the young shape of her body in a bikini from head to toe, in the earliest film, it's a kind of violation I can't say I can live with. There's something remarkably stupid about young female flesh; I shouldn't have been so hungry for the details. I wouldn't care a jot about Claire's knee unless there was that psychological component involved, tempter to temptee, irrelevant as to who would be considered the one seducing in a court of law.
Rohmer's global conception, then, is poetic and philosophical, sensual and imaginative, a set of images working upon the interior like Mallarmé's great book would. Rohmer's visual "world" seems like the real world but it isn't.
A few weeks ago I was waiting to pick someone up at the airport. While waiting in front of the gate I was observing a strawberry blonde to my left. The cascading hair was seductive, so were the hazel eyes, so was the cream colored blouse; what wasn't seductive was the army fatigues she wore, a lack of comportment nowhere to be found in Rohmer's world. But most specifically, the hunger with which she wolfed down a frosted covered danish, assuming no one was observing her, so much so that the sugar frosting had gathered on the far corners of her lips. Nowhere in any corner of Rohmer's imaginative universe would a detail like this ever be allowed to intrude. If you would see this superficially, it would appear a form of discrimination; if you would see this within the poetic imagination, it would appear just.
On a personal note, I hold a special affection for Marie Rivière. I won't explain why, only to say that I plan on writing a few poems with her in mind. The stuttering ambivalence she displays when she's given the opportunity to speak reminds me a lot of myself, for one thing, and the way ambivalence creates an environment ripe for over-interpretation, for oneself, for those listening and observing, as well. Like with the Aurora Cornu character, most of my relationships have been treated propositionally, even experimentally, if we wish to be scientific about it. But what can't be denied is that whether the ambivalence is French or Japanese, if it sounds as sweet to me as does Rivière's French, a certain respectful distance is absolutely necessary, such as in the way we see Brialy and Cornu treat each other. While the credits are rolling at the very end of Conte d'Automne the mature Rivière displays a look of doubt. It's my undying hope that this added touch isn't gratuitous.
