Eric Rohmer, French Filmmaker, Dead At 89

There are surely many people in the I've-never-seen-an-Eric-Rohmer-movie club though those of us in that number who have at least heard of him take some small solace from that.

Rohmer, a journalist turned French film director and member of what was called the New Wave, died at age 89. While he wasn't a household name, true cineastes of a cerebral bent view him as a filmmaker with worthy philosophical observations about love, fidelity and temptation.

As Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker in 2006:

Rohmer was born Jean-Marie Maurice Sch??rer in 1920, and took his alias for his film-related work in 1950 at the Cin??-Club of the Latin Quarter, a crucial breeding ground for the French New Wave. Just as Sch??rer's life was taken over by his pseudonymous career, his films' distinctive style came to usurp their substance. Though Rohmer shows intelligent people behaving—and, above all, talking—with reasoned refinement, he hides an inner world of violently raging desires beneath his characters' intellectual games. In effect, Rohmer is a secret Sadean, a Surrealist manqu??.

From near as I can tell, Brody seems to have been accusing Rohmer of tapping into his inner Marquis de Sade though from what I can tell Rohmer appears to have been plying much tamer waters than the insatiable, recidivist marquis who in our time would have found his name on a list of dangerous sexual predators.

 

Filmmaker magazine an informative 2001 appreciation of Rohmer by three screenwriters who wrote on the director's significance.

An excerpt from Ira Sachs:

I admire Eric Rohmer for many of the same reasons I love Henry James: both find drama in the precise observance of shifting emotions. Every scene in a Rohmer film is taut with possibility; every character, on the verge of falling — falling in love, falling into melancholy, or just falling from their own sense of high and stable ground. His protagonists are an arrogant lot — his women are particularly surly — and that is what gives the films their subtle tension; we are always wondering how the mighty will fall.

Rohmer's films are made up of conversations; they are filled with nervous, talky people, who act as if language could protect them from experience. With continual attempts at self-description ("I was born to be unhappy," says Laura, typically, in Claire's Knee), his heroes and heroines imagine that they can talk themselves out of anything, and thus be saved from pain, or even more specifically, the surprise of emotion. And they, like all of us, are wrong.

In almost all of Rohmer's films, his characters run into themselves — they discover, or are made to discover, their own precariousness — and the result of this reckoning is always extraordinarily moving. At first glance, Rohmer seems like a very soft filmmaker. He works gently, but always, by the last reel, he has tightened the screws. Like the coming of seasons, with which Rohmer is clearly obsessed — witness Le rayon vert (Summer) and Autumn's Tale — we almost don't notice the arrival of strong emotions. And then, like winter, they are upon us.

Eric Rohmer has the most consistent career of any of the great filmmakers alive today. There's not one false note in his huge and expansive body of work. In that way, again, he's a bit like Henry James. Of no one else but Rohmer could it be said that he is making films at 80 that are as perfectly realized and as emotionally risky as the ones he made 40 years before.

Sounds like many of us who haven't seen a Rohmer movie should place watching one on our to-do list.