Near the start, after protagonist Adrien has failed to convince his girlfriend to come with him to stay at a friend's villa in the south of France, he arrives at said villa and tells us in VO about his intention to spend the summer in quiet, implicitly monkish contemplation. He gazes at the sea, flips through a volume of Rousseau and he and his friend Daniel sit on the lawn wrapped in blankets like hippie sadhus, loftily discussing the discipline of idleness.
And then the villa's third guest, young pretty Haydée, shows up and all this high-minded stuff instantly flies out the window. Adrien goes a little nuts trying to get her to fancy him without ever stooping to liking her back or even being nice to her, and manages in the course of this to screw up his business plans.
The whole thing is like an externalised dramatisation of what happens when someone meditates or otherwise seeks to take the spiritual path: distractions and temptations pour in, the ego runs rampant etc. Like an updated illuminated manuscript. Except, of course, even the meditation here is already pure egotism, a pose, a mark of the character's overweening vanity. The reviewers saying there's nothing going on here are missing the joke. In its low-key, subtle way, it's hilarious, and, though it was only Rohmer's second feature, and though I hugely value his whole career, I think it's his best and it's one of my top three favourite films.
To better understand the critique qoing on here, it helps to know something about Rohmer's process. Even at this early stage, he had an unusual method of script development, interviewing his actors about their own lives and attitudes and then using what he learned to rewrite the script. In this instance, the interviewees playing Adrien and Daniel were Patrick Bauchau, who went on to a Hollywood career, and Daniel Pommereulle. Both were then members of an art group with Phillip Garelle, the director of La Cicatrice Interieur, one of the most extravagantly pretentious films of all time. Bauchau was envied in Paris as a well-off man about town. These guys were radical-chic privileged fops in other words. Bauchau commented later, "Rohmer used the film to take the piss out of us," though he added generously that it was only when his acting career took off that he realised how special it had been to have a director who worked so intensively with his actors and went to such depths.
Still, though its easy to miss it in the film's quietude and beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Nestor Almendros), the piss-take is there and it's acidic. Three moments take us to the heart of it:
In one of the film's prologues, a friend of Daniel's compliments him by comparing him to pre-revolutionary aristocrats who disdained everyone incapable of understanding their aestheticism. Later, Adrien, forcing one of Haydée's boyfriends to leave the villa, casually remarks, "Might is right." And finally, he avers that anyone lacking in beauty should be cast, "into the ovens."
So there you have it. These hippie dandies, far from having anything revolutionary or liberating about them, are operating in the modes of aristocrats and fascists. This is 1967 and Rohmer is already seeing the seeds of the failure of the hippie project. Where Joan Didion in reporting on the San Francisco scene was doubting the viability of a revolutionary movement bereft of ideas and articulacy, Rohmer was pointing out that the standard bearers of the age of Aquarius were spiritually bankrupt. Maybe his examples were particularly egregious, but in the clear friction created from attempting to combine spirituality with hedonism and narcissism, I think Rohmer identifies a fundamental and fatal contradiction in the hippie approach in general.
And it's a measure of the film's greatness that it manages to be so perceptive about its times while also delivering a timeless morality lesson on vanity. Un conte moral indeed.
And then the villa's third guest, young pretty Haydée, shows up and all this high-minded stuff instantly flies out the window. Adrien goes a little nuts trying to get her to fancy him without ever stooping to liking her back or even being nice to her, and manages in the course of this to screw up his business plans.
The whole thing is like an externalised dramatisation of what happens when someone meditates or otherwise seeks to take the spiritual path: distractions and temptations pour in, the ego runs rampant etc. Like an updated illuminated manuscript. Except, of course, even the meditation here is already pure egotism, a pose, a mark of the character's overweening vanity. The reviewers saying there's nothing going on here are missing the joke. In its low-key, subtle way, it's hilarious, and, though it was only Rohmer's second feature, and though I hugely value his whole career, I think it's his best and it's one of my top three favourite films.
To better understand the critique qoing on here, it helps to know something about Rohmer's process. Even at this early stage, he had an unusual method of script development, interviewing his actors about their own lives and attitudes and then using what he learned to rewrite the script. In this instance, the interviewees playing Adrien and Daniel were Patrick Bauchau, who went on to a Hollywood career, and Daniel Pommereulle. Both were then members of an art group with Phillip Garelle, the director of La Cicatrice Interieur, one of the most extravagantly pretentious films of all time. Bauchau was envied in Paris as a well-off man about town. These guys were radical-chic privileged fops in other words. Bauchau commented later, "Rohmer used the film to take the piss out of us," though he added generously that it was only when his acting career took off that he realised how special it had been to have a director who worked so intensively with his actors and went to such depths.
Still, though its easy to miss it in the film's quietude and beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Nestor Almendros), the piss-take is there and it's acidic. Three moments take us to the heart of it:
In one of the film's prologues, a friend of Daniel's compliments him by comparing him to pre-revolutionary aristocrats who disdained everyone incapable of understanding their aestheticism. Later, Adrien, forcing one of Haydée's boyfriends to leave the villa, casually remarks, "Might is right." And finally, he avers that anyone lacking in beauty should be cast, "into the ovens."
So there you have it. These hippie dandies, far from having anything revolutionary or liberating about them, are operating in the modes of aristocrats and fascists. This is 1967 and Rohmer is already seeing the seeds of the failure of the hippie project. Where Joan Didion in reporting on the San Francisco scene was doubting the viability of a revolutionary movement bereft of ideas and articulacy, Rohmer was pointing out that the standard bearers of the age of Aquarius were spiritually bankrupt. Maybe his examples were particularly egregious, but in the clear friction created from attempting to combine spirituality with hedonism and narcissism, I think Rohmer identifies a fundamental and fatal contradiction in the hippie approach in general.
And it's a measure of the film's greatness that it manages to be so perceptive about its times while also delivering a timeless morality lesson on vanity. Un conte moral indeed.