Seasons of Beauty, Tales of Life
on Éric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons
The season is changing—Boreas gives way to Zephyr, buds begin to stud the branches of trees, night and day drink equally of the stream of time, shoots of green and blossoms of yellow emerge nascent from the earth, sunlight eases into our lives with its golden haze, and I am watching Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps, 1990).
This is the first in his Tales of the Four Seasons, and though the films have different plots, characters, and settings, it sets up the general concerns that will thread them together and lend them an overarching cohesion. We start with Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), a philosophy teacher who finds herself in an odd conundrum: while her boyfriend is away, she can’t bear to stay at his messy apartment, but neither can she go back to her own place, which she has temporarily lent to her cousin. She goes to a party, where she meets the charming ingenue Natacha (Florence Darel). Natacha invites Jeanne to stay at her house—her father Igor (Hugues Quester) is away, and Jeanne can sleep in his bedroom. But things are not what they seem, and this is no mere act of altruism. Intrigue is afoot.
It turns out Natacha’s parents are divorced, and she loathes her father’s much younger girlfriend Éve (Eloïse Bennett). Jeanne is her solution. The next morning, Jeanne has an awkward run-in with Igor, perhaps not quite as accidental as it seems, and then accepts Natacha’s invitation to their somewhat rumpled but nevertheless lovely country house. Older and more even-tempered, Jeanne listens as the younger girl’s complaints initiate her into the mystery of a disappearing necklace, a family heirloom intended for Natacha that she suspects Éve to have pinched. When Éve and Igor join them for dinner, however, Jeanne can’t help getting along with Éve as the conversation turns to philosophy. Natacha feels betrayed. There is more shuttling back and forth between Paris and the country house; at the latter, an argument ensues between Natacha and Éve, who leaves in a huff. Natacha’s boyfriend shows up, and Igor and Jeanne are left alone. They discuss the fact that Natacha has set them up, but Igor tells Jeanne that he has come to feel an authentic attraction towards her. Jeanne allows him to sit next to her, hold her hand, and kiss her. Then, wanting to detangle herself from this moral web, she leaves for Paris.
This is where the real drama occurs, when Jeanne goes back to Natacha’s home to gather her things. Thinking Jeanne is accusing her of nefarious intentions, Natacha becomes distraught. In a last-minute miracle, the necklace turns up, the mystery is cleared, Jeanne’s boyfriend is finally returning, and her cousin, finally departing, has left her a bouquet of flowers. Jeanne takes the flowers to her boyfriend’s apartment, where she replaces the old, dying ones; as Natacha says upon seeing the misplaced necklace, “Life’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
The next three films give Rohmer a chance to paint this theme in hibernal, estival, and autumnal tones, employing plots that are equally convoluted. In A Tale of Winter (Conte d’hiver, 1992), Félicie (Charlotte Véry), a hairdresser, finds herself vacillating between her boyfriend Loïc (Hervé Furic), a librarian, and Maxence (Michel Voletti), her manager at the hair salon. However, neither of them are real contenders: Félicie is still hung up on her brief, passionate summer fling from five years ago with Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche), a romance that yielded a daughter, the trés adorable Élise (Ava Loraschi). In A Tale of Summer (Conte d’été, 1996), Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a mathematics graduate and erstwhile musician, goes on holiday to a seaside resort, where he waits for his sort-of girlfriend Léna (Aurelia Nolin) to join him. Léna doesn’t come, and he bides his time by composing sea chanties and stringing along Margot (Amanda Langlet), a summer waitress and ethnology PhD, and Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), a former choir singer, utterly unable to make a decision between the three women. In A Tale of Autumn (Conte d’automne, 1998), the 45-year-old widow and winemaker Magali (Béatrice Romand), is set up by her best friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière), who—unbeknownst to Magali—has placed a personal ad for her in the newspaper, a process which produces Gérald (Alain Libolt). However, her son’s young girlfriend Rosine (Alexia Portal) wants to pair her off with Étienne (Didier Sandre), a much older teacher who is also Rosine’s former lover, and foibles ensue.
Rohmer reveals his optimism as a storyteller when the miracles required to break our protagonists out of their labyrinths of indecision actually materialize. In A Tale of Winter, the separation of Félicie and Charles hinges on the fact that Félicie had accidentally given him the wrong address, and the exhilarating reunion that frees Félicie from having to make the impossible choice between two men she does not cherish results from a serendipitous meeting on a bus. It's a deus ex machina that comes to the rescue of Gaspard in A Tale of Summer: counting on two being unable to make it, he has invited each of the three girls on a trip to the island of Ouessant. At the last minute, Léna and Solène each call to recommit to the trip, unaware that he has offered the same invitation to others. Just as this web of his own making threatens to tangle him inextricably, he receives a call from a friend, who informs him that there is a man willing to sell him the cassette recorder he wants, if only he can hurry over as soon as possible. The next morning, he boards a boat, and Margot, plain, unassuming, friendzoned—the substitute of the substitute—having been revealed, degree by degree, to have been the right choice after all, waves him off. Magali in A Tale of Autumn gets a ride from Gérald but absconds when faced with the threatening possibility of a man she might actually like and who might actually like her back, forcing him to drop her off at a rural train station. She waits until dark, then takes a cab to Isabelle’s; coincidentally, Gérald is there too, and Isabelle gives Magali the nudge she needs to let love in. Magali invites Gérald to an end-of-harvest feast, and the film ends with nightfall, jubilation, and the celebration of marriage.
Rohmer’s is a universe in which the Fates employ as their servants funny little blips of accident or coincidence, and then he draws the curtain back and shows us that coincidence is fate, and fate is faith. What we witness in so many ways are crises of faith, followed by the joyous and life-affirming restoration of that faith. Characters lose their center, and then a kind of moral gravity pulls them back in towards what they know in their hearts is right for them. Jeanne knows she must return to her boyfriend and stop indulging the plots of a girl who still has a great deal of growing up to do; Félicie knows she must not lose the certainty that Charles will return to her and their daughter, restoring the sacred family circle; Gaspard knows he must let go of the sirens to follow the song; Magali knows she must break the chains of the isolation that has kept her so safe and yet so stifled for so long. Rohmer never passes judgement on his characters, never condemns them for their actions or follies, yet nevertheless the moral center holds. An axis of values serves as the unswerving backbone; in A Tale of Autumn, for example, Isabelle, pretending she is Magali during her first interactions with Gérald, seems treacherously close to tipping over into a dangerous intimacy with him, and then she reassures him—as well as us, holding our breath—“I haven’t had a type since I found mine 24 years ago.” This is not that kind of a film, in which infidelity and its emotional wreckage are glossed with a veneer of glamor or carelessly glanced over, and Isabelle is not that kind of a woman.
Indeed, Rohmer's first series of films was Contes moraux (Moral Tales). “In French there is a word moraliste that I don’t think has any equivalent in English,” he explains in an interview.1 “…a moraliste is someone who is interested in finding out what goes on inside man. He’s concerned with states of mind and feelings.” Éric Rohmer is a moraliste. In his world you will find no explosions, no magic, no superheroes, save the quieter detonations of the heart, the enchantment of the everyday, the humble heroism of self-inquiry, self-understanding, and self-change. The real villainy lies within ourselves, our self-deception and our self-denial, our inability or unwillingness to step outside of ourselves and see things clearly, to own our desires, to resist our poorer impulses. We are lost; the path lies within ourselves, and what it takes to find our way back to that path is nothing less than what one might call God. “I’m not strong on conquest, or pushing my luck,” says Gaspard to Margot. “But I like luck to push me.”
This seems a curiously passive way of looking at the world, and yet I don’t think this is exactly the message Rohmer means to leave us with. His characters always seem to be in search of something, restless, roving, trying to pin things down. In the case of Félicie and Gaspard, this amounts to a shuttling between romantic partners, an inability to make a decision once and for all, to choose and to commit. For characters like Jeanne and Loïc, it takes the form of philosophical analysis, heady intellectualizing. Jeanne talks a great deal of herself, yet we get the feeling that she may not know herself as well as she thinks she does, that she’s going around and around in circles, that her calm, rational self-awareness is really a mask that keeps her from looking her desires in the eye. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”2
When I first watched these movies, I felt annoyed at the vacillations of their characters. French films seem to have a particular affinity for cheating, affairs, noncommittal love; I thought this was yet another manifestation. Get it together, I thought, watching Jeanne and Igor on the couch, Félicie turning from this man to that man and then back again, Gaspard bouncing from girl to girl like a surly, bumbling, nerdy Lothario, Isabelle inching closer towards the man she had intended for her best friend. It was not until later that I saw Rohmer’s project of interrogating faith, prodding it until it was forced to reveal its workings in the world, its significance and its necessity.
Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, 2007), is on the surface an entirely different animal from the Tales of the Four Seasons. In contrast to the very real, very tactile world of ’90s France, it takes place in a dreamy, idealized version of 5th-century Gaul. In this bucolic fantasy, shepherds and shepherdesses swan about in filmy robes, ribbons streaming from their hair, reciting poetry and generally ignoring the sheep in their ward, while nymphs materialize out of nowhere to save heroes from untimely deaths and druids dispense wisdom like drops of elixir. Here we have two lovers, Astrée and Céladon; Céladon’s parents don’t approve of Astrée, and she tells him to feign interest in another girl to put them off the scent. He complies; she witnesses this and, thinking him unfaithful, banishes him from her sight. He tries to drown himself and is rescued by nymphs, while Astrée reads a poem he had carved onto a tree trunk; realizing his fidelity, she mourns bitterly. Both characters’ faith is put to the test again and again: Céladon is so faithful to Astrée’s wishes that he refuses to let her catch sight of him, alive and well, and Astrée refuses to wipe her tears despite repeated taunts and exhortations to forget Céladon. Finally, the druid intervenes, and the reward of true faith is the triumph of true love.
This is the fairy-tale world that lies hidden beneath the surface layer of the real world we all live in. It is immanent, and were we to stir this surface with a finger, it would reveal itself in the ripples. But what is required of us to see it is faith. Félicie is electrified by faith in the cathedral in Nevers; a person who prefers to follow her own “intimate” convictions over religious ones, she has a moment of spiritual clarity in which she realizes that she doesn’t love Maxence enough to live with him. Back in Paris, with similar clarity, she tells Loïc, “I love you. Not enough to live with you, only to ruin your life.” They go to a performance of A Winter’s Tale, and Félicie is profoundly moved when the statue of Hermione—a woman dead for sixteen years after her husband has unjustly accused her of infidelity—comes to life. Loïc asks Félicie if it was magic that brought the statue to life or if she was always living, and Félicie replies, “You don’t get it. Faith brings her to life.” She goes on to recount her experience in the church. “I saw that I was alone in the world: it was up to me to act…. I won’t do things that keep me from finding him,” she says, referring to Charles. Finding him is unlikely, “but that’s no reason for me to give up.” The chance is low, but like Pascal, Félicie is willing to bet on it because if she finds him, it’d be “a joy so great I’ll gladly give my life for it.” Act like God exists and—who knows? In all its beauty and its mystery, the world has wonders enough to surprise us yet.
The Tales of the Four Seasons are the kinds of films I would love to fall sick for, fall sick on purpose for, simply for the pleasure of having hours and hours of idle time, no reason to leave the comfort of my bed, and carte blanche to dispose of this time as I wished, by wrapping myself in gorgeous unfurling after unfurling of 35mm film. When I was a child, I caught colds often, and in the midst of my physical suffering would spring up a secret glee: now could I finally pick up once more the book that had grown cold on the nightstand, now could I reacquaint myself with the world of its author, now could I sail endlessly through that most beautiful of blue seas, the imagination, without having to come ashore for a good long while.
For the many liters of ink that have been spilled on the themes of films, on their narrative structures, on their dialogue, on analysis of their characters, on their psychological undercurrents or philosophical underpinnings, it must be said that the pleasure of cinema is first and foremost a visual pleasure. When it comes to the films of Éric Rohmer, that visual pleasure is also a tangible pleasure; it is a pleasure that is felt by the eyes as well as seen. “I give extra importance to the poetry of cinematography,” he once said. In A Tale of Springtime, it is the poetry of interiors that comes alive: the intimacy of spaces piled high with books and papers, brightened with the fresh blooms of April and May, made cheerful with a painting or a print, a patterned curtain, a view of rambling greenery. In Winter it is the poetry of the daily commute, of a little town where streets have names like “Street of Pretty Mittens” and “Break-Neck Street,” of grey December light and the rigors of a life that yearns. Summer treats us to a poetry of sand and sea, beachgoers, boats in a rocky harbor, pirate-themed sitting rooms and treks through wild landscape, while Autumn sends us off with its “mellow fruitfulness,” its rugged vineyards where black grapes hang in bunches like beads, with the dying gold languor in the trees and light the color of harvest.
This is a world in which a long-lost necklace or lover could suddenly turn up in the most unexpected of corners, setting everything back into alignment, yielding joy and clarity and delight beyond measure. For this is life as we know it, were we to open ourselves up to its everyday beauty, its humble poignancy, the lyricism of a bustling city street or neglected country garden, the profound truths hiding in plain sight beyond the most ordinary conversations and interactions between people. This is the world we live in, and we must have faith in it.
Graham Petrie, Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1971): 34-41. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211422]
1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV
What an illustrative and thought provoking film review! I’ve never personally been a big fan of European movies (I’ve also always thought the French treated relationships - and life by extension - too frivolously, and I still have yet to laugh at a British joke) but I’ve recently started to reconsider that view. Perhaps age and maturity is making me realize there is just as much entertainment, and indeed, value, in watching someone confront and overcome their inner demons compared to a real life one. Certainly it’s more relatable to the lay viewer and what is film but a reflection of our own lives and priorities?
Rohmer’s films sound like a great study on human relationships and faith. I found the movie stills you featured in your article almost hypnotizing in their simplicity, bucolic setting and hazy color schemes. They remind me of Wes Anderson films: ensemble casts with complex inter-relationships, themes of loss and self discovery….though perhaps with slightly less eccentricity. What a treat to add to my ever growing watch list. Thank you for the suggestion - and beautiful review.
The quality of your writing is absolutely outstanding. Love to read your piece.