Eric Rohmer at 100

It’s unfortunate that both Tarantino and Avary found it necessary to distance themselves from a filmmaker as humane and civilized as Truffaut. What’s worse, though, is that neither even thought of name-dropping another leading figure of the new wave: Eric Rohmer.

One wouldn’t expect either Tarantino or Avary to emulate Rohmer, but his name is too often omitted from the conversation about the new wave. In fact, in churning out one literate yet lively comedy-drama after another, among them such classics as My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), Rohmer bequeathed to audiences a record of accomplishment that arguably eclipses that of his more famous contemporaries. To start with, Rohmer was sincere about his characters’ predicaments without ever being sentimental, making his films sharper and starker than the sometimes treacly Truffaut. His work lacks entirely the shrill self-consciousness of Godard, and his lean-and-mean shooting style is far more timeless than those of such flashy counterparts as Jacques Demy or Claude Chabrol.

If Rohmer comes across as the sensible, sensitive big brother of the new wave, perhaps it is because he was its senior citizen. Born 100 years ago last month in Nancy, France, Rohmer was 10 years older than Godard and 12 years older than Truffaut. In fact, he was late to the filmmaking game, having spent his salad days filing film reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. Rohmer was pushing 40 when he made his first feature film, The Sign of Leo (1962), and north of 85 when he embarked on his last, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) — a mere three years before his death, at the age of 89, in 2010.

Of course, worse than being forgotten is being flat-out misunderstood. Somewhere along the line, the word spread that Rohmer’s films were deadly dull. The ultimate put-down came in Arthur Penn’s great film noir Night Moves (1975), when Gene Hackman’s mustachioed private eye Harry Moseby says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

Maybe Rohmer’s wordiness did him no favors. Or maybe the director invited such generalizations by lumping batches of his films together within discrete series. For example, My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and Chloe in the Afternoon are entrants in Six Moral Tales. Other films belong to Comedies and Proverbs or to Tales of the Four Seasons. Grouping films together makes it too easy for viewers to miss their unique qualities. Rohmer is too little praised for his talent in depicting the splendor of nature and the vivifying effect of a change in seasons: The snow has a cold heft in My Night at Maud’s, and surely no filmmaker ever presented summer with a greater sense of wistful anticipation than in one of the Comedies and Proverbs, The Green Ray (1986).

In fact, when viewed today, Rohmer’s films ironically seem more au courant than those of many of his peers — perhaps owing to their focus on the privations of the young and his keenness occasionally to invite his youthful casts to participate in the creation of his scripts. Rohmer, who was Catholic, did not allow his ever-advancing age to estrange him from the concerns of his fresh-faced characters, including the hero of My Night at Maud’s, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who naively but wholeheartedly sets his cap for a put-together blonde bombshell he sees at Mass, or the heroine of the remarkable A Good Marriage (1982), Sabine (Beatrice Romand), who with an equal combination of guilelessness and resoluteness determines to renounce her existence as a libertine for the life of a wife.

Rohmer also distinguished himself from his peers by remaining in contact with eternal themes and ideas. Despite the film critic milieu from which he sprang, Rohmer claimed in a 1994 interview with the New York Times to be inspired by other, older traditions. “I was very much influenced by ancient and medieval literature, by Greco-Latin mythology and church dramas and Shakespeare — more influenced by literary sources than by film itself,” said Rohmer, who on several occasions made rich, arcane period pieces, including Perceval le Gallois (1978), adapted from a 12th-century work in verse by Chretien de Troyers, and The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, taken from a 17th-century novel by Honore d’Urfe. “Western civilization shapes the content of my films, provides me with subjects that haven’t been used before.”

In no film did Rohmer’s gifts emerge with greater richness than A Tale of Winter (1992), which revolves around the sometimes comic, frequently heart-rending patience exhibited by a young woman named Felicie (Charlotte Very). Following a carefree dalliance with Charles (Frederic van den Driessche), Felicie fails to provide him with her proper address — a lapse in concentration that becomes problematic when Felicie, unexpectedly pregnant, becomes the mother of Charles’s daughter. Felicie never wavers in her devotion to the now long-gone Charles and her belief that her daughter deserves him as a father. In an altogether unexpected way, A Tale of Winter expresses both Rohmer’s tolerance of the vagaries of youth and his Catholicism: The director puts up with Felicie’s ill-advised behavior because it is mitigated by her subsequent spiritual rigor: Her watchful waiting for the reappearance of Charles is akin to a knight-errant’s quest. Rohmer is a moralist, yes, but never a scold.

It would take stubbornness of the highest order not to recognize the enduring power of the new wave’s gentlest poet, Eric Rohmer.

Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.