The Comedy of Love — Unpublished

The French director Eric Rohmer is one of the main filmmakers of what we know as the French Nouvelle Vague, the New Wave movement that took over European cinema in the early 1960s and revolutionized cinema through its rupture with Hollywood. With beautifully shot nature scenes, carefully thought out characters and dialogues on love and life, he seems to have nothing to do with directors such as the raging revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard or the angry feminist that was Agnès Varda.

Whilst the world was falling apart in the mid-1960s, Rohmer thought he’d rather explore cinema as a way of representing the reality surrounding him, and not ideological productions of the world outside. To him, the role of the filmmaker was to record and conserve the ordered beauty of the world, rather than attempting to transform it as others tried to do right next to him, and so it was the simple lives of the Frenchmen that caught his eye.

The calm layoff of the French Riviera, the country houses of the Alps, the flustered lives of Parisian workers: the day-to-day was what led Eric Rohmer into filmmaking. He was interested in beautiful views and the people who lived within them, but mostly what was going on inside those people’s minds. In his movies, Rohmer turned France into his own psychoanalytical laboratory. Why do people make the choices they do? Why do they fall in love? What goes on inside the most stable of friendships? How do simple quick encounters reverberate in one’s life? In his two main movie series The Six Moral Tales and The Comedies and Proverbs, the French director examines reality by turning it into cinema.

Nevertheless, Eric Rohmer sees reality a certain way, and portrays this vision in his films. This becomes especially notable when we take into account the way the director depicts women in his films: under the ever-present male gaze. In his first sequence of films, The Six Moral Tales, female representation is simply horrid. All the films within the series follow a pattern: a young male protagonist in distress about his life is torn between a seductive, libertine woman, and a gracious, ideal woman to whom he is already promised.

In these first films, Rohmer often presents women as objects of desire whose subjectivity is relegated to the male protagonist, as her only trait is to seduce and provoke the otherwise moral man who is then corrupted by women who deeply desire him. Women are seen as bits and pieces of a body – even in the titles. Claire’s Knees speaks to itself by representing the sexualized fetishistic voyeurism of the film’s male characters. The director takes advantage of the newly gained freedom of female sexuality and uses it in order to make women the villains of western morality.

While directors have used stories in order to criticize morality, Rohmer’s tales lack a coherent subjectivity; he does not stand for or against his characters, varying between criticism and celebrations of their thoughts and actions towards women. As a consequence, all women are left seen as desired objects, reflecting the views on sexual and social codes society and the director himself lived by.

By the end of the 1970s, however, there was a very clear shift in perspective within Rohmer’s films. In his next series of films, Comedies and Proverbs, women are more often than not the main characters, displaying a displacement from women seen under the male gaze, within the Moral Tales, to complex women, seen beyond male presence, within the Comedies and Proverbs.

His female subjects suddenly gain sexual and social identities detached from male lives. In films such as The Green Ray (1986) and The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987), his narrating principle shifts, with women dictating their own stories as they become speakers rather than passive characters affiliated solely with the male protagonist: it is now their story.

One fact that explains this sudden special care for his female characters is the fact that Rohmer started working with a mostly female crew, with women not only in front of cameras but also behind them. One important person in the making of these films was cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux. She filmed female experience as it is, not under the distorted lens of the male gaze.

The director takes special interest within these movies for female friendship and the struggles of women in search for independence and sexual fulfillment in a time when this was not talked about on-screen. Through this display, he allows for the creation of a space in which to figure out the vicissitudes inherent to life as a woman.

Despite its faults, Rohmer’s filmography is deserving of praise. These beautifully directed and filmed tales showcase reality not only on-screen, but behind it, making it clear that diversity behind the scenes has the power to turn already good films into masterpieces of cinema.