Eric Rohmer was 50 when his mother died in 1970. They were in regular contact, and he often took his two sons from Paris to see her at her home in Tulle. But she went to her grave convinced that her eldest child was a classics teacher at a provincial lycée. She had no idea that he had been editor of the world’s most influential magazine of film criticism, Cahiers du cinéma, or that he had recently directed the Academy Award-nominated film My Night at Maud’s. This is one of the many curious aspects of Rohmer’s life, and one of the revealing aspects of his impressive but peculiar character that comes up in this definitive biography of the writer-director.
It’s safe to say that Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) must rank either first or second among postwar French filmmakers. When you consider how many remarkable movies he made, and that his name has been turned into a widely used adjective in France—rohmérien—it’s hard to argue that anyone other than his friend François Truffaut can be regarded more highly. But it wasn’t only his mother who initially disregarded him: His tenure at Cahiers had ended with his dismissal, and he found himself, in 1963 at age 43, in the position of a failed moviemaker with a wife and two young children. Consequently, he spent the next few years making educational documentaries for the French government.
Born and raised in Tulle, Rohmer was a quick study with a passion for literature and languages who passed the written examinations for the École Normale Supérieure three times. Yet, held back by his great shyness, he failed the oral exam on each occasion. That led him to a passage as a classics instructor. When Rohmer left this post to work as a journalist, he asked his wife to help him keep his family in the dark about his life. So, in daily exchanges, he was Maurice Schérer (“Momo”), and in the world of show business, he was Éric Rohmer. And in the early 1950s he actually wrote articles under his birth name praising the movies of his alter ego.
But he was relatively alone in championing these films. For the most part they went unreleased or were treated with indifference. Still, throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Rohmer busied himself writing stories, screenplay treatments, and novellas while becoming active in the Parisian film club scene, where he befriended most of the figures who would soon define the French New Wave, including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette.
Yet Rohmer stood apart from them, to some degree, because he was older, a practicing Roman Catholic, and very much a political conservative. This conservatism ran sufficiently deep that Rohmer was among those who disdained Charles de Gaulle from the right, believing the general had betrayed his country’s loyalists in Algeria. Later, and still working into his eighth decade, he would advertise his convictions in his much-acclaimed account of the French Revolution, The Lady and the Duke (2001), which has been widely interpreted not only as an attack on the Jacobins but a brief for the Bourbons.
That late triumph, however, stands apart from what Rohmer is best known for: offbeat comedies of manners that fondly examine the motivations and morality in love affairs among the bourgeoisie. The classics of this genre that he wrote and directed include The Collector (1967), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Pauline at the Beach (1983), The Green Ray (1986), and A Tale of Winter (1992), along with such slighter but charming films as Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), The Aviator’s Wife (1981), and A Good Marriage (1982).
What all of these movies have in common is a simple, immediate style and recognizable characters. Produced at low cost, nearly all made money. Set on actual streets and photographed with rudimentary equipment, their focus is upon their characters and story, not on effects or constructed sets. So Rohmer’s parsimony, which extended to 16-millimeter filmmaking in the late 1960s, allowed him another chance in his film career, following his early failures. Eventually, this method would become so ingrained that when Emma Thompson asked to star as an Englishwoman of the 1790s in The Lady and the Duke, Rohmer turned her down in favor of an unknown.
This decision may have also reflected his belief that the effect of his films drew from what he had learned as a documentarian: Awkward-and-improvised is more persuasive and affecting than artful-but-false. Arguably, that is the general lesson of the New Wave, one that current American filmmakers would do well to absorb.
Jonathan Leaf’s new play, deConstruction, opens in New York in March.
