Rabbit Rabbit #20: On Rohmer Time
Counting down and up, in France and beyond
A Summer’s Tale (1996)
Last summer, I made my first foray into the cinematic oeuvre of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer. Metrograph had preemptively knighted 2023 the “Summer of Rohmer,” and released a t-shirt bearing this declaration that sold out in minutes. On the back is a gorgeous print of scenes from three of Rohmer’s most beloved films. Naturally, it’s a matter of pride to be able to quickly identify them. I was lucky enough to cop a size medium before I’d laid eyes on a single Rohmerian frame. Typical.
It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with Rohmer’s career, which spanned five decades in its prolonged heyday and led to twenty-two feature-length films, with a number of shorts to boot. He mentored the likes of Godard and Rivette, and according to Richard Brody, “came to the movies more or less by default, after having tried and exhausted the other arts.” Rohmer was a writer, having published his first and only novel Élisabeth in 1945, a high school teacher of Latin and Greek, and, above all, a perpetual scholar. Simply put, I knew that to enter into his world one must be prepared to never truly leave, so I had to be ready.
Rohmer’s films can be easily categorized, which for me renders them personally enjoyable. Their specific settings, characterizations, and subject matter lend themselves neatly into ways of thinking about movies and, by extension, thinking about thinking. Rohmer himself set out to make it so; there are the Six Moral Tales (from the ‘60s and ‘70s) and the subsequent Comedies and Proverbs (from the ‘80s), collections of six films each that explore various questions of ethics and morality, including the fundamental differences between men and women. Most beloved to me is his Tales of the Four Seasons, the final cycle. Its result is pretty intuitive– four movies set during, and purported to encapsulate, each season.
The meticulous subdividing of thinking and time is a common theme in Rohmer’s work. It is an understatement to say that time is de l’essence in every Rohmer film. In fact, the synopsis for most of them could be boiled down to a single temporal sentence. I have exercised this below.
Time is running out. (The Green Ray)
Time cannot move fast enough. (Claire’s Knee)
Time can be manipulated. (Love in the Afternoon)
Time has passed without our noticing and now we are old. (A Tale of Autumn)
In every single film, time is ticking. It begs to be analyzed down to the second. With what do we fill the empty spaces of the minutes and hours? With whom is it worth spending our time, or are we better off alone, perhaps to realize our full intellectual potential?
The Green Ray (1986)
These are pertinent ruminations for me to tackle today, which is my 24th birthday. I am, to my amusement, now nestled within the classic age bracket of many Rohmer protagonists, often heady, artsy people new to adulthood, full of desire yet unsure how to act upon it. They explore friendship, romance, and work both independently and within the context of their upbringing. And there is, of course, nothing more fun than imagining oneself as if in a movie. I can confirm from the trenches that the ramblings of Rohmer youths are not at all dissimilar from the dialogues in which I and my anxious contemporaries participate today.
In true Rohmerian fashion, I tend to mark time in strange and hyperspecific ways. This is due, I think, to my capacity for recalling exact dates with extreme precision. In this vein, it has become a tradition for me to watch Rohmer movies when I am sick. Last year from July 28 to August 8, again briefly somewhere around September 12, and waveringly between December 10 through the new year, I was incapacitated with cold and flu variants. During these periods, I consumed almost the entirety of Rohmer’s filmography.
My reasoning for this viewing habit is the sheer comfort Rohmer’s movies provide, the definition of comfort being multifold. The first thing any viewer will notice is that they are set in beautiful French locations ranging from the bustling streets of Paris, the ambling countryside, or along the idyllic Riviera. Most of the characters are objectively attractive and impeccably dressed, and the disasters that befall them are trivial on a grandiose scale, but within their private worlds, seem life or death.
A Tale of Winter (1992)
Over the weekend Jessica and I rewatched A Summer’s Tale, the 1996 film in the Four Seasons series. It follows Gaspard, a recent mathematics graduate and aspiring musician on holiday in the seaside town of Dinard in Brittany. Gaspard is quite literally insufferable. He is also handsome and charming and looks amazing licking an ice cream cone in a V-neck tee, so we watch him wander the coast for two hours in spite of his moral failings. In Dinard, Gaspard meets Margot, a friendly and pretty waitress with a PhD in ethnology. Although he is waiting for Léna, his long-distance girlfriend, to show up (ah, the days before iMessage and Find My Friends), he forms an intimate friendship with Margot and becomes interested in her friend, the brazen and sexy Solène. On a quest to visit the island of Ouessant with a mate, Gaspard entangles himself in a web of false promises and empty philosophical proclamations to each girl, which grows increasingly chaotic when Léna arrives in the third act of the film
The theater exploded with laughter at nearly everything that escaped Gaspard’s mouth. The plot morphs into pure situational comedy –almost screwball– replete with a knee-slapping phone call scene in which three people ring Gaspard in quick succession, changing his plans by the minute. But what drew me in during both my viewings of this movie (which as I calculated were exactly a year apart) are the title cards that show up between every scene, slating the day of the week and month. Characters are cut off at awkward times, sometimes mid-sentence, and we are thrust right into the next day with no warning. The effect is humorous on the surface, but at play is a deeper meditation on the passage of time.
By implementing the time cards, Rohmer actively engages us in an activity at which we are already adept: counting down the days to the end of something. His choice mirrors the function of exact time stamps in Agnès Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7 to pique a sense of anxiety about the future and the time that’s already passed. We empathize with Cléo, who awaits a call from her doctor regarding test results for stomach cancer. Gaspard’s situation is obviously less grave, but I can relate to his desire for a concrete plan for an adventure, but not being able to set one due to inconveniences that appear out of his control. And the whole time, there’s this sinking feeling that time is running out.
For audiences, the attention to time in Rohmer’s movies allow a rare, immersive viewing experience. If you’re crazy like me, you’ll want to watch them during the days counted out in the movie. I got so excited when the July 28th card flashed onscreen; I looked around like, “Guys, that’s today!” I wished everyone had cheered. He uses the cards to count down Christmastime in his 1992 film A Tale of Winter. My Night at Maud’s, arguably Rohmer’s most famous movie, takes place on New Year’s Eve, while Love in the Afternoon follows a man during a series of midday trysts that break up his monotonous office work.
A Summer’s Tale
Throughout A Summer’s Tale, the characters are surrounded, entrapped even, by reminders of the passage of time. Young children and elderly people are thoughtfully positioned in frame as if eavesdropping or spying on Gaspard and the women. Some kids stare blatantly into the camera lens. In a pivotal conversation, Solène and Gaspard separate briefly to reveal a small, elderly woman seated on a bench behind them. She peers over her shoulder when Gaspard raises his voice, and then turns back around. What is she thinking? Is she reminded of her own romantic adventures in days gone by? The result is distinctly funny, but also a direct message from Rohmer that young people have a habit of wrongfully believing that they are the center of the universe. There seems to be no cure but the revelations provided by the march of time itself.
Last week, I was at dinner with my friend Violet. Upon realizing it was July 24, she remarked, “summer’s already over.” We laughed, but it’s true. Time is ticking and it’s sort of utter hell. My birthday lands on that delicate tipping point of summer where the realization sets in that nothing lasts forever. The turn of the calendar– school starts, vacations end, the heat will lift soon (except not really because it remains stifling in New York until October now.) We all start to get a little weird this time of year. And then there’s the pesky issue of the years. 24: the age of Cassandra Edwards, the begrudged, graduate student narrator of Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. It’s the age of the singer in Neil Young’s “Old Man”: Old man look at my life / Twenty-four and there’s so much more. Amy Adams was 24 when she starred in Drop Dead Gorgeous, her first movie. “24: that’s how old Kyra was when _______!” Where do I fit in? Is it entirely selfish and unproductive to wonder?
Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987)
Rohmer characters wonder these same things. They are presented with a series of problems that either catapult them into rash decision-making or freeze them into indecision. Félicie, the single mother in A Tale of Winter, yearns for her lost love Charles of five summers prior. On a random bus ride across the city, she ends up sitting across from Charles with her daughter, who calls him “Papa” later that evening as he joins them for New Year’s dinner. Gaspard ends up getting a surprise phone call from an instrument salesman regarding an 8-track recorder he needs to pick up immediately to further his career, freeing him from the agony of the Oeussant trip. Things work out just in the knick of time or by some coincidence that borders on the absurd.
While his movies do not suggest that we cling to the promise of a fairytale ending to all our worries, Rohmer does signal that good things come to those who have patience, and more importantly, to those who remain interested in their surroundings despite feeling dissatisfaction with them. As Margot, who conducts interviews with Bretons between restaurant shifts, says early on, “I’m curious about people. No one’s totally uninteresting.” This is the conviction at the heart of Rohmer’s work, and one that I feel myself returning to when the slippage of days, months, and years becomes overwhelming. Writing is a way for me to channel that curiosity. I scoff at my old writing, even writing from a few months ago, because my curiosities shift. To remain curious is not to remain young, but rather to grow into oneself, and understand that everything really can change in an instant. And that fact, as we know, stands the test of time.
P.S. Recommendations! Rachel Syme’s delightful profile of Lena Dunham & Amanda Petrusich’s introspective profile of Clairo, both for the New Yorker. Correspondingly, Clairo’s new album, which is just super good vibes. Lastly, I am now aboard the Rachel Cusk train, admittedly very late. I just finished Outline, am halfway through Transit, and already can’t wait to start Kudos.
