Being confined at home these days, all sorts of contradictions assail our perception of time. As an antidote to the normal, frenetic OTT fare, I’ve been revisiting some films by one of the great directors of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer. By the time he makes Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s) in 1969 — the first one of his films to find international recognition — the field of the New Wave is already crowded. Besides Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut many others have weighed in with contributions — with films mostly about contemporary France, constructed in ways that challenge and dismantle the conventional modes of storytelling followed by American and European commercial cinema at the time.
Such is the quiet confidence and originality that Rohmer brings to the screen that his films stand out amidst all the formidable stylistic pyrotechnics. With films like Maud,Claire’s Knee and Pauline at the Beach, Rohmer establishes himself both as the master narrator of the lives of ordinary people and the great explorer of a quiet yet utterly gripping cinematic form.
Rohmer films are like slow-release capsules — they don’t unload on you all at once or constantly. The beginnings are anti-dramatic, as if the filmmaker has no interest in catching or holding your attention, as if he’s saying ‘keep watching if something on the screen interests you’. Like a dhrupad singer starting an alaap , almost meditating the sur out of his body, or a chess-player ruminatively playing against himself, Rohmer starts to let things happen before his camera: two men finishing a night-shift in a sorting office have a quick chat about a plumbing job; a woman in a train glances at a man across the aisle who’s reading a book; two women drive up to the gate of a beach house, one of them opens the gate, they drive in.
Emotional quicksands
From these deceptively simple opening gambits Rohmer creates subtle mesmerisations that slowly ensnare you. The characters reveal traits, pick up obsessions, start sinking into emotional quicksands on innocently flat looking beaches. Suddenly you find yourself caring about one character even as they irritate the daylights out of you; another character, whom you initially dislike, starts to win you over as you guiltily realise you share some of their foibles; a situation between a group of people repels you but you can’t turn away till some resolution is reached. As the film progresses there is an accumulative unease, something which could lead to horror or laughter, or sometimes both. Rather than entertain you with surface explosions, Rohmer’s films create implosions within you.
“The one experience I’ve missed is loneliness and the pain it causes,” says, Louise, a beautiful 20-something. It’s the kind of thing Rohmer’s characters say all the time, the self-awareness unleavened by any self-consciousness. One wants to say this is typically Gallic but perhaps it’s not, perhaps it’s just in the architecture of the language, perhaps if someone said it in Punjabi it would sound different but just as true to character.
Potent distillation
“People who’ve given up on seduction are dead,” says Octave, a balding, unprepossessing writer-nerd and you find yourself laughing hard. While his characters often speak of seduction, Rohmer strives not to grope the viewer’s knee with his cinematic hand. “To love someone deeply, I have to love them from afar, now and then,” says Louise. Perhaps it’s the same with Rohmer who rarely goes into close-ups; people are almost always framed in mid-shot. Instead of a lens breathing down an actor’s neck (and via that, yours) you get the precision of the camera staying still on a character as they talk to another, their eyes moving the off-screen character from one point of space to another. Without warning you could fall into the rabbit hole of watching a conversation between two people for 20 minutes. But then you realise that no shot or sequence is held for even a frame longer than necessary.
After a while you understand that this storytelling has centrally to do with a potent distillation of cinematic means, of shot, sound, mise-en-scène and cut. Words are important in Rohmer’s films, spoken ones, often lots of them, but you find yourself ‘inside’ a character not through any writerly omniscience but because what you’ve seen and not seen mix into a complex alchemy with what the characters have seen and heard.
These films are particularly good to view in this fractured and compressed time because in Rohmer’s world people are often trapped in their own emotional silos, struggling to get out. It’s a world where sometimes a beautiful vantage point can become utterly claustrophobic and a small contained space the most freeing. Eric Rohmer is a master at pulling out the carpet from under what we are used to seeing, the usual suspect linkages to which we are addicted. Watching these stories from another time and place is a wonderful balm for the cabin fever of the soul.
Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and columnist.
