Took in Jacques Demy’s debut film Lola (1961) t’other night, mostly with grimacing disaffection, although I enjoyed the local color of Nantes, the baroque architecture, the dazzling washes of light, Anouk Aimée’s eyes, equally dazzling… She’s one of my favorite Fellini gals, as a matter of fact, and frankly much better served by him. He groks her beauty as Jacques Demy apparently can’t… I felt like Demy was cramming her into this script, and it didn’t sit well. (Not that her vitality or raw sex appeal were in any way unwelcome in my particular living room.) Must be said, however, the film’s ahead of its time: her suitor is an incel 40 years before incels were even a thing! And I won’t judge Demy too harshly based on this evident juvenilia. (Pretty sure this guy was Agnes Varda’s husband, and she’s on another level, I’ve seen two so far—mindblowing—I’ll be spacing her films out like I’m doing with Bergman and Fellini. And Godard. I feel like I should have watched all these people in my youth, what was wrong with me? Actually, I watched plenty back then, just didn’t fucking get it. Thank you, Criterion Collection, for bringing it all back home….)
But Lola’s not the movie I was going to write about; just giving it a mention. I actually started on Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales last night, and I gotta say, it’s a fascinating journey so far through the minds of randy PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) before that was even a thing! Granted, I’ve only seen the first three as of yet, but I strongly suspect the last three won’t disappoint in this regard…. There’s a kind of analytic fervor to both the scriptwriting and the filmic technique, a desire to impose a rational, deterministic scheme on probabilistic events; even as the world throws its curveballs, the key to preserving “morality” (and thus, comfy bourgeois self-entitlement) is to get down to BUSINESS and keep your eye on the ball! You MUST create and preserve Order at all costs. If temptation distracts you briefly, don’t beat yourself up, just toss that hot temptress back into the ditch she crawled out of, and get yourself back to the BUSINESS of transforming life from an organic Process to a mechanical System. Something along those lines, but I’ll revise it as necessary. Will the last three prove me wrong? Honestly, I fucking hope so. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving these films.)
1. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1961) is only 20 minutes, and it’s hilarious. The protag develops a crush on a woman he passes every day in the street and works up his courage to approach her, lucks out with a sincere improvisation in which he flexes all of his PUA skills and manages to persuade her to let him ask her out next time he sees her. Of course, after that, he never sees her—he takes to haunting the streets at the dinner hour, fingers crossed they’ll cross paths… and being hungry, he ends up snacking on pastries from the corner boulangerie. This becomes his daily routine. Scene after scene of him standing in the street stuffing cookies and sticky gateaux in his mouth while longing for sexual consummation—just cracks me the fuck up! Frustrated by his failure with the original girl, he lays the mack down on the counter girl at the bakery, and she reluctantly agrees to go out with him after much hemming and hawing…. but then the original girl shows up, after all—she had broken her foot—and he simply ghosts the bakery girl, figuring that was the “moral” thing to do, since she wasn’t really the one he’d wanted to begin with. You’ve gotta stick with The Plan.
2. Suzanne’s Career (1963), as a title, neatly sums up the business of being a woman in a marketplace of love. You interview for the position of girlfriend, and if you measure up to the arbitrary standards of the hiring manager, he onboards and integrates you into the corporate culture of his gonads; over time, whether or not you’re a “good fit” for those gonads becomes evident, and you either stay on to advance further in the organization, or you’re shown the door to make your way through the cruel world eventually into the offices of some other business that happens to be hiring, rinse and repeat. Suzanne exemplifies the humility of the applicant, while Guillaume represents the whimsical, self-regarding narcissism of the hiring manager, and Bertrand observes and participates in their antics with a measure of scorn for what he sees, especially in Suzanne’s self-abnegation, but he comes around by the end when he discovers that not only has Suzanne survived this process intact, but succeeded in establishing a steady, stable relationship for herself with a pretty decent fella, while his own love life is pretty much the same shitty mess it’s always been. His big epiphany amounts to: Wow, I thought she was worthless, but turns out she knows this game better than me.
3. My Night at Maud’s (1969) gives us Jean-Louis, soi-disant “Catholic Engineer.” He studies mathematics and probabilities and appears to base his life decisions on Pascal’s Wager, which posits that the chance of God’s existence, however small, warrants betting the farm and believing every word of the Dogma, since the reward (if it’s true) is infinite. Kinda like the lottery, gotta play to win! Heeeey… you never know! It could happen to YOU! You gonna let that cigarillo-chomping mouthbreather ahead of you in line at the corner shop have a legitimate, statistically supported shot at the Dream, but not yourself? Fuck no, buy the ticket, yo, just keep it on the DL from your homies, they won’t let you forget what a hypocrite sounds like… Where was I? Mais oui, Mssr. Catholique, via chance encounter, spends the night with a splendidly sexy divorcée (Maud), but thinks pure thoughts and longs for the blonde he hasn’t even properly met yet (he caught sight of her in profile at Mass last Sunday morning and then pursued her sweet bicycling posterior in his car until la Justice of snarled traffic intervened to derail his righteous quest to become her new bicycle seat), and indeed manages to preserve his vaunted chastity in the face of, yes, stiff temptation. Oh, the trials and tribulations of l’homme moral! Fully revved by the unconsummated night at Maud’s, he PUAs the girl of his rêves in the street (again, on the basis of Pascal’s Wager) and manages to spend the night at her place, too! (In both instances, his excuse is the weather: a snowstorm, a.k.a. probabilistic event.) Again, an entirely chaste evening, but this time he’s in it to win it—and win it he does! I mean, er, win her he does. Her! Sires a child on the new possession and five years later runs into Maud at the beach, spazzes a bit at the recollection of his sublimated sizzle for this fallen hussy, this temptress of worldly delights whom he so manfully resisted at his weakest moment, but thoroughly enjoys the spiritual cat fight that erupts betwixt her and la femme-trophée as they pad past each other in the sand.
One of the techniques I love in this film is the insistence on showing one person in a conversation without cutting back and forth for reactions. We hear the interlocutor off-screen while mercilessly revealing every smallest gesture and micro-expression of the camera’s subject. Each character receives this treatment in turn; there’s no favoritism. The choice of who to present in a given conversation seems to depend on who’s most likely to be squirming. It requires the actor to truly inhabit the character, to vocalize lines, but also to listen to lines, to demonstrate comprehension and thought-formulation in the muscles of the face, often for several minutes at a time. Just one false move would ruin the take. Something of a tightrope, and I would call it bravura filmmaking.
[ 7-22-22 ]
4. La collectionneuse (1967) is the first of these Moral Tales that I simply found distasteful. None of the characters have any charisma or appeal. The previous films give us characters who, regardless of how unpleasant their behavior may seem, at least appear to harbor within themselves SOME modicum of conscientiousness towards others. Whereas, in this film, I feel like I’m watching sociopaths.
If I’m being generous, the film’s ostensible purpose seems to be to demonstrate the tyranny of solipsism in male-female relations. Our hero Adrien simply cannot imagine that Haydée—who looks maybe 19 and not even glancingly interested in him—is not spending every minute of her time scheming to acquire him for her “collection,” which is defined as the set of all men whom she has taken to bed. Although he clearly wishes to count himself among them, he doesn’t want to have been successfully “collected”; rather, he wants to be the one who “collects” HER. (And then discards, sans doute.)
Of course, his reasoning that she is a collector of men relies solely on the observation that she is sexually liberated and unabashedly active in that lifestyle. It also depends on his reluctant (but ineluctable) attraction to her, which places him in an undeniably submissive posture, a power hierarchy he cannot tolerate. He, after all, has to be on top! He has created a mythology around himself that he is infinitely desirable to women, thus positioned above them in a sexual caste system visible only to him, and so he must be the monarch of his relationships: this is the natural order, and anything else would be an insult to pride and self-respect. Indeed, pride, we must infer, is the basis of morality, for he constantly refers to “morality” as the justification for his endless barrage of cruel, demeaning tactics against this poor girl, when it is clear he simply wants the upper hand and resents her bitterly for her refusal to submit to his domination. It seems to be the habit of the characters in these Moral Tales to fetishize morality as the guiding principle of behaviors that are actually arbitrary and even animalistic—anything BUT moral. Adrien, in the voice-over narration, is relentless in justifying his actions as consequences of adherence to a code of moral conduct, when we can see clearly that he is just horny. (Sort of like how Don Rickles pretends he’s defending the morality of election integrity, when really he just wants that sweet, sweet immunity from criminal prosecution afforded to anyone who sits behind the Magic Desk in the White House. Funny how that is.)
Pretty dismal film, all over. This one’s in color and has that drab, jaundiced palette you often see in 60s films. It is well filmed, anyway, and I did enjoy the languorous narrative tone—envied the vacation vibes… maybe I’ll take one of those, someday? As for the choice to use color film, maybe Rohmer wanted to show how tanned and perfect the bodies were? Frankly, I think I would’ve tolerated the horrid characters much better if the film had been in black and white. There would’ve been a more innocent beauty to their bodies (the shape and sheen) that would have redeemed, somewhat, the ugliness of their souls. Instead, they look like they’re posing for a perfume ad in EVERY scene. Hard to take them seriously….
Yeah, so… the first strikeout in this series. Can’t win ’em all!
[7-23-22] Back here the next day to wonder why I reacted so strongly against this particular film. Somehow, I saw the humor in the first three, whereas this one felt like a grim slog through lives of nitwits. Objectively, now… was it? Or did I have some personal, emotional response that caused me to unfairly malign this piece of art? I’ll have to reserve judgment, methinks, until I’ve completed the Moral Tales…. There’re only two films left in the series, I’ll certainly get to them pretty soon, but they’re both in color, like this one, which makes me nervous…. In any case, let’s see how those play out, and if it seems necessary, I could revisit this one at some later moment… you know… in tranquility.
[7-26-22]
5. I’m happy to say Claire’s Knee (1970) seduced me back into the wicked embrace of les contes moraux. I think perhaps La collectionneuse suffered from excessive vapidity in the characters. They were such empty husks of human beings, there was no way to engage their adventures with any degree of empathy; mostly what you felt was contempt. In Claire’s Knee, it must be said, Claire and her boyfriend Gilles do fit in that mold and could easily have been transplanted over to La collectionneuse without even noticing the change of scenery; if the movie had been about them, it would have been dreadful indeed! Fortunately, their roles in this film are almost incidental. The main three characters are Jerome, Laura, and Aurora (a name that, amusingly, seems to induce epilepsy in French tongues), and they are all delightful (and charmingly scandalous) in their own ways. Which is such a relief—I was rather apprehensive after that last one!
What we’re looking at here is a loose modernization of that prototypical French roman scandaleux Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Believe it or not, I read that novel back in college (not for a class or anything… but that would’ve been cool!), and I even managed to summon up most of the author’s name just now before resorting to Google to give me “Pierre,” which I never would have gotten. And of course, there’s a great 80s film adaptation… a couple of them come to think of it. Stephen Frears did Dangerous Liaisons, and Milos Forman did Valmont. Holy shit, I’m on a roll! I’m going to look those up to save potential embarrassment, however…. Vindicated. I seem to recall the Frears was better than the Forman, but face it, I was a teenager when I saw these movies, so it’s plausible I was full of shit. Probably not going to test that theory out anytime soon, though… Preferable to continue in ignorance of my adolescent shittiness.
The point being we have a couple of diabolical schemers collaborating to lave their corruption in the refreshing spray of girlish innocence. Aurora is a writer looking for material and has taken the ethically dubious step of creating mischief in the real world so that she can observe and record the ensuing mayhem in her novels, becoming like as unto a Goddess in our sublunar realm. In this case, she encourages her old friend Jerome, with whom she has been unexpectedly reunited during a July holiday, to seduce Laura, the lively, burgeoning 16-year old daughter of her host. Aurora is cheerfully evil, smiling blandly through every obscene suggestion she makes as if it were perfectly reasonable for a man (such as Jerome) planning to be married inside of 6 weeks to pursue carnal pleasures with a minor. He goes along with it because he is so laid back and easy-going, but mainly, we suspect, because the ripe young fruit being set before him is so enticing.
His pursuit of Laura fizzles due to her intelligence and self-awareness—her perspicacity in seeing through his act. She comes to understand that her attraction to him stems not from sexual heat, but rather from filial affection; she had confused her desire for a father figure (her own father being deceased) for lust. A practical man, perceiving he won’t succeed with her, Jerome’s lechery immediately transfers to Claire, Laura’s stepsister, in the form of an erotic obsession with her knee, which he longs to touch after seeing it pressed against a ladder. Intriguingly, Laura is present and witnesses his witness of the holy knee, but we are not given access to her impression of the scene. Did she perceive the dirty layers of his perversion in that moment? Or did her innocence protect her from understanding?
He even describes all of this to Aurora, who suggests baldly that the only cure for his predicament is to touch the knee. And he manages to arrange a situation in which the act can be performed: isolate Claire, mangle her emotions until she breaks down into tears, and then “comfort” her by massaging the knee. The caress of the knee is the victory of analysis over innocence. She accepts his caress at face value despite its clear disingenuous intent, which subtly defiles her in his eyes and removes her from the category of innocence, thus sating his appetite for corruption and resolving his desire for her. He is now free to return to his fiancée with a clear conscience.
I will say, although I’ve disparaged her relentlessly here, I actually came to admire Claire in the end for defying Jerome’s nasty bit of emotional sabatoge. He incites her tears by maligning her boyfriend’s fidelity. The final scene of the film depicts her and Gilles (the boyfriend) in conversation (with ever-nasty Aurora eavesdropping from her balcony!), the gist of which conveys both his innocence of the charge and her acceptance of his explanations. We sense that they are not in danger of breaking up over this injustice, and that is something of a relief.
[7-27-22]
6. Love in the Afternoon (1972), or shall we call it by its French title L’amour, l’après-midi to distinguish it from the Billy Wilder film of the same name? I saw someone online call it Chloé in the Afternoon, which is intriguing, but I don’t know where they got that from…. Whatever it’s called, I LOVED it right up till the end when it walked off a cliff. What the fuck.
I’m sure I’d be disputed by anyone who heard me say it—which my site’s visitor statistics (or lack thereof) reassure me won’t ever happen—but I got some serious Eyes Wide Shut vibes from this film, right from the start. One of the first shots gives us Frédéric’s wife Hélène performing ablutions in da buff, full length from behind (interesting contrast with one of the final shots of Chloé in da buff, full length from behind… both women are gorgeous, but I’ve just gotta give it to Chloé); a nearly identical shot of Nicole Kidman opens Eyes Wide Shut. Like Tom Cruise, Frédéric spends his days at work bored out of his mind because the modern world is a fucking soulless machine within which humans must struggle on a daily basis to survive as organic, loving, principled, ecstatic creatures of infinite spiritual dimension. Frédéric must abandon his wife and children every single day in order to “make a living” and maintain a respectable “bourgeoise lifestyle.” Meanwhile, his wife, also working, must abandon her children to a nanny, a stranger in the household whose only function is to be the mother to her children that she’s not allowed to be. The modern family is thus demonstrated to be a monstrous deformation of what human beings actually need and desire. Any wonder that these people are so fucking unhappy? Ha ha!
I think this last moral tale is the first to feature a married protagonist. He spends the movie falling in love with Chloé, and it’s a wonderful relationship. I really enjoyed experiencing their development as friends. He is put off by her, at first, and there is quite a bit of friction in their chemistry, but you feel, underneath it, the genuine mutual esteem. Each of these people sincerely cares for the other. And it’s not as if he doesn’t love his wife; he does, I believe him, but he also protests a bit too much. Probably because he feels guilty about his ever-expanding affection for Chloé, spending all that time with her in the afternoons (which otherwise, he avers early in one of the numerous voice-over narrations, are so dreadfully dull and oppressive), and feeling so natural with her, so comfortable and relaxed.
Of course, she wants more; why would a beautiful young woman spend so much time with a man? It’s not like he’s gay, after all. He’s married, but that’s no impediment; this is France we’re talking about. She tells him straight up, she wants his baby. She’ll raise it on her own. How trés moderne! (I hope I’m getting these Frenchisms right! Once again, my visitor count preserves me from embarrassment…)
So… right on the verge of consummating this relationship we’ve been so deeply present with for the last 90 minutes, this dipshit chickens out, sneaks out the door leaving a stunningly naked Chloé waiting for him in her bed, and runs home to his wife, who seems uncomfortable and even distraught at his awkwardly timed arrival (the afternoon!); we are given to infer that she herself may be conducting an affair. The pair commences lovemaking as we look politely out the window—at the afternoon, I guess—and Fin. Jesus fucking Christ. I won’t deny, I really liked Hélène—she was cute and friendly, and had a very cozy bond with Frédéric—but I was actually rooting for Chloé. I had trouble with her at first because she’s rather neurotic and nervous, not very comfortable in her own skin, and preoccupied all the time with the ridiculous circumstances of her life… and there was so much disharmony between her and Frédéric in the beginning, I just felt tense whenever they were together… but over time, they seemed to fit better and their emotions started to flow in the same channels… you felt a real friendship happening. I was surprised and pleased by that; I hadn’t expected it, although I don’t know what I was expecting… I guess something sociopathic like the previous movies!
So when he left her hanging like that—and in such a humiliating position, stretched naked on the bed, offering herself to him, awaiting his love, even while he’s grabbing his coat and sneaking out—it was just so unbearable, such a betrayal… And what is wrong with me, one wonders, that Frédéric’s fidelity to his wife ends up feeling like a betrayal! In any case, this is a good spot to bring up Eyes Wide Shut again. Remember the ending of that? The couple reunites and reaffirms their marriage with that famous line, “Let’s fuck”? Same ending. Frédéric and Hélène reaffirming their marriage and running off to fuck. It’s the same movie, essentially! We get a glimpse of the wife’s psychodynamics, but mainly stick with the husband, whose own endless self-analysis and doubts about the integrity of his marriage lead to risky wandering and adventures, but he “rescues” himself from moral peril just in the nick of time…. Something like that, anyway. Ha ha! I’m too tired to work it out in any more detail than that. Anyone who’s read this far… well, I feel for ya.
Okay, that’s all six of Six contes moraux, and I rate the overall experience as highly enjoyable and thought-provoking, if at times infuriating. My favorites are a tie between My Night at Maud’s and Love in the Afternoon, even though that ending really fucking disappointed me. I can’t believe I wrote all this shit about them, too! I’ve been on a tear, for some reason, but I’m sure it won’t last. I would like to write about Fellini, though…. and I’ve got so many Bergmans to tackle yet; I had a great time writing about him, I’m sure there’s still fuel in the tank for the rest. And I’ve been loving all these French movies, just something about French people that turns me on. So we’ll see, maybe I’ve got a few more of these to go…. ;)