Rohmer: Founding Practitioners and Observation Rohmer

rohmer: His revolutions, in other words, were quiet ones, couched in a perpetual remove and observation, according to Rabble. Rohmer's greatest popular success, 1969's My Night at Maud's, is frequently misremembered as a nonstop talkfest, as it begins with extended passages of an unnamed Catholic engineer Jean-Louis Trintignant silently trailing a woman Marie-Christine Barrault who will, by film's end, become his wife. Strange that auteurism should fail us so completely in the case of one of its founding practitioners, but Rohmer was always an odd man out among his contemporaries, if not in the remove of years he was a decade older than most of his Nouvelle Vague brethren then in the deceptive placidity of his art. The devoted Catholic's brief flirtation with the fetching divorc e Maud Francoise Fabian brings about his ultimate moral choice, a fascinating psychological mishmash of Catholic liturgy, Pascalian hypothesis, and Hitchcockian blonde/brunette dichotomy that's all too often mistaken at least in the West for Rohmer's own worldview. These films are more concerned with individual moral codes and how they play off of each other within a given situation, and though the films share a basic narrative structure a man in love with one woman is tempted by a second, only to return to the first it's the specific milieu and, resultantly, the characters who inhabit that space which determine the ultimate outcome. At the heart of this misreading is the word moral itself, which is typically defined in collective terms the conscientious needs of the society at large trumping the various bodies that make it up. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.