Lucidno        ERIC ROHMER

I once asked Rohmer how he reconciled his realist aesthetic with the artificiality of a studio film like Perceval, and he answered in part by recalling André Bazin’s defense of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as a realist work: that at least the dirt in the film was real. For a director whose sense of realism is more primitive than Bazin’s — though it’s obviously indebted to Bazin’s theorizing on the subject — it was an apt response. In Perceval, I would argue, the 12th century emerges as real, and this isn’t a compliment I’d make as readily about any other film with a medieval setting — Dreyer’s Passion, Carne and Prevert’s Les visiteurs du soir, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake. The merit of Rohmer’s realism in Perceval is that it brings something otherwise dead and forgotten to life — not because Rohmer’s imagination is especially rich but because he sees no alternative to his literalism, even if it makes some audiences laugh in disbelief. Nobody will laugh in disbelief at Autumn Tale (1998). The last and best of his “Tales of the Four Seasons,” it’s about the difficulties and pleasures of rediscovering love in middle age. Many of Rohmer’s recent features have been limited by their concentration on youth, which can make it difficult to tell some of them apart — a problem shared by some of the late films of Yasujiro Ozu (many of which are also named according to the seasons: Late Spring, The End of Summer, An Autumn Afternoon, etc). Yet Autumn Tale is nicely balanced between youth and middle age (Rohmer’s own present age group appears not to interest him at all).

I suspect that what interests Rohmer most of all is his actresses. That Isabelle (Marie Riviere), a town bookseller, and Magali (Béatrice Romand), a country wine grower, are both bumping middle age in Autumn Tale is probably less important than that this is Rohmer’s fourth film with Riviere and his sixth with Romand. His first film with Romand, Claire’s Knee, was made in 1970, and his first film with Riviere, Perceval, was made eight years later. To compound the associations, the two actresses appeared together once before, in one of Rohmer’s best films, the uncharacteristically semi-improvised 1986 Summer — the confusing American title given not to one of the “Tales of the Four Seasons” but to Le rayon vert (“The Green Ray”). Following both actresses in Rohmer’s work is not unlike following such actors as John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen, and Ward Bond through the movies of John Ford — we grow up with them as they work through a succession of similar themes.

Isabelle and Magali, who live in the southern Rhone valley, have been best friends their whole lives. When the film opens, the happily married Isabelle is planning her daughter’s wedding, and Magali, a widow whose two children have left home, is debating whether to attend. Isabelle would like to find her friend a mate, but when she suggests that she place a classified ad in the local paper, Magali recoils at the idea. Eventually Isabelle places an ad of her own without telling Magali and winds up in effect screening Gérald (Alain Libolt) for her.

Meanwhile, Magali’s son Léo (Stéphane Darmon), a college student, is dating Rosine (Alexia Portal), who doesn’t take him very seriously but is strongly attached to his mother. She too hopes to find a match for Magali and tries to set something up with her ex-lover, philosophy teacher Étienne (Didier Sandre), who’s still somewhat smitten with her. Both of these awkward matchmaking plots finally come together on the day of the wedding.

The story develops in leisurely fashion, gathering momentum and purpose as it proceeds, until by the end you may feel like cheering. Some of the characters and relationships seem peculiarly, even quintessentially French: the propensity of French professors to become involved with their students makes the scenes between Rosine and Étienne almost archetypal; disapproving American viewers may be surprised at how much the precocious Rosine controls the romantic impulses of her mentor, who’s roughly twice her age. (She seems equally in control of Léo, whom she clearly regards as a stopgap.)

Perhaps the most charming thing about Autumn Tale is the degree to which Rohmer finds a happy meeting ground between his own brand of middle-class realism and the kind of Hollywood cinema he once celebrated as a critic. One wonders how accidental it is that Libolt resembles Charles Boyer or that a good deal of the plot hinges on the potentially disastrous consequences of impersonation and misrecognition, both classic Hitchcockian themes. 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. As Bazin put it, referring to Jean Renoir: “There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the progress of the movies.” What I think I like most about Autumn Tale is that it’s just as abstract as Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, and every bit as real.

Jonathan ROSENBAUM
first published in
www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/06/master-of-reality/