Writer/director Éric Rohmer stood out among French New Wave filmmakers not so much in emphasizing talky, over-analyzing young adults (chic, attractive, delving ever deeper into shallower waters), but in how he let his multi-part series of moral fables argue against each across separate titles. And he certainly put out enough product to let that happen!; like Grandma Moses with her paintings, he worked in batches. This cautionary tale, from his Comedies & Proverbs series, isn’t so much best-of-the-set (variations in quality are hardly a deal-breaker with Rohmer, he’s a good dinner guest whatever the menu), but is a favorite among the Rohmer cognoscenti. It falls into his Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For storylines, with Pascale Oglier as a recent interior decorator/designer grad who moves out of her fiancé’s banlieu apartment hoping separation will improve a floundering relationship that finds her extrovert ways in constant conflict with his stressed non-sociability. At first, it’s Parisian pied-à-terre heaven in her second home, with Fabrice Luchini’s insistent, if married, intellectual jabbering away in one ear, and a sexy sax player she met at a party offering rock star vibes and (just as important) the promise of a one-night-stand and early morning departure. But just as Oglier finds the answers she’s been seeking, the landscape changes underfoot. Rohmer simply nails these characters, for better and for worse (that French rock dancing!), and typically covers his sophisticated visual tracks so as to seem utterly artless. Don’t you believe it. That banlieu building might be a living Mondrian; a motorcycle ride in Paris an arrondissment of its own; Oglier’s pied-à-terre a testing ground for love & lighting. All embedded, like its lightly heartbreaking plot, under piles of fizzy (often very funny) French talk. A unique kind of filmmaker (might Aki Kaurismäki pair up?), Rohmer‘s an acquired taste worth acquiring.
DOUBLE-BILL: Usual entry point for Rohmer is MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S/’69 with Jean-Louis Trintignant.
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