The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

It's summer in Paris. Delphine (Marie Rivière), recently broken up with her boyfriend, is two weeks away from an extended vacation. Suddenly, the phone rings in her office. It's the girlfriend coming on vacation with her, calling to cancel. Delphine doesn't yell, but her tone betrays something beyond irritation. Her co-workers, though, take no heed, and they continue to work inches away from her, not even focused in that purposeful way people are when trying their damnedest not to be caught listening in to an uncomfortable phone call. This is obviously such a minor deal that it's not worth their time.

The rest of the film follows outward from this inconvenience, which is complicated by Delphine's inability to find adequate alternate plans for her summer. With Paris half-empty as everyone takes their vacations, Delphine worries about spending her vacation alone. But friends and family immediately invite her to come along to various vacations in the countryside and abroad. One even discusses an upcoming camping trip that makes her sound like the people Laura lambasted in Claire's Knee, playing on the kindness of landowners by taking over the place for their campouts. With every invitation, however, Delphine begins to invent excuses not to go and continues to say that she'd be all alone, even if she went with a big group. Things are clearly not what they seem, and the alternating desire for and rejection of companionship defines the wandering internal conflict of The Green Ray.

Shot on 16mm and tracking Delphine's restless search for a vacation that makes her comfortable, The Green Ray has a street-level, improvisatory feel that recalls the earliest days of the French New Wave, the days Rohmer more or less missed. The dialogue matches the looseness of the direction. Delphine hangs out with friends who encourage her to get out and meet people, to maybe hook up with a guy, just have some fun. But she keeps hedging, saying that she'll be as alone with a group of strangers as she would just driving to some locale. One friend (played by Béatrice Romand, who speaks with a directness and insight that suggests she grew up right out of her character in Claire's Knee) gently but forcefully tells Delphine she needs to open up. "You must escape your loneliness," she says.

Slowly, a portrait emerges, of a woman locked in a depression because she is lonely, and lonely because she deliberately avoids any kind of contact with people. Rohmer tracks her as she roams around Paris, heads to Cherbourg, the Alps, and finally Biarritz. In all places, people are kind to her, men flirt with her, and the relaxing beauty of the surroundings offers tranquility and calm. This is true even of Paris, which the Parisienne finds so dull but is, after all, one of the great destinations of the world. In one delightful early scene, Delphine and some friends find themselves in conversation with an elderly gentleman who never got these two-month extended breaks the well-off young adults currently enjoy. But he never regretted missing the chance to see the mountains or the beach, and he speaks of all the things there are to do in Paris. "We don't have the sea but we have the Seine. Same thing!" he says, both provincial and wise.

Delphine doesn't listen to him any more than she listens to her friends, and wherever she drifts, she finds ways to avoid people and prevent connections. In Cherbourg, she spots an attractive sailor looking her over, but when she and a friend strike up a conversation, Delphine suddenly pulls away, saying "I got suspicious." Likewise, she ignores a man on the street who unabashedly ogles her, barely pausing to give him her disgust. Roger Ebert attributes such moments as a reaction against gender roles. "She recoils from the pre-packaged lines of the guys she meets in bars and on trains," he writes. "She simply cannot engage in that kind of mindless double-talk any longer. Beneath her boredom is genuine anger at the roles that single women are sometimes expected to play."

But to come to that conclusion ignores Rohmer's approach to gender, which is natural, not polemical. The sexual critiques of My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee may have put the male perspective under a probing gaze, but if Rohmer doesn't use his women as expressions of male neuroses, as Molly Haskell said, he also doesn't use them as a weapon. The reason women in Rohmer films so deftly frustrate male projections is because they simply are, actual human beings with their own hangups, desires and personalities, not canvases to be painted on.

Furthermore, Delphine's social problems go well beyond sexual frustration, and Ebert misses so much of her character when he summarizes her as "one of those people who does not like to be alone, but who is particular about what sort of company she's in." It is here I must admit a deep personal investment in Delphine because I see so much of myself in her. Delphine is more than just "particular," she is pathologically incapable of being comfortable around people. "I have a lot of things to express, but I don't express them!" she shouts at Béatrice when the latter gives her the aforementioned admonishment. But the defensive, self-pitying tone of her retort betrays a desperate sentiment, a double-edged statement that reveals not only the stubborn pride she takes in not being like those who embarrass her and a wish to not feel embarrassed by completely normal behavior.

The film's best scenes rest gently on Delphine as she slowly kills the atmosphere of geniality and warmth around her. At a beach getaway she will soon abandon because everyone else there is already paired up, Delphine inadvertently kills the buzz at a dinner. As the host sets down a plate of pork chops, she interjects that she doesn't eat meat. But in her attempts to not make a fuss by sticking to her salad, she can't stop talking, harping on that she's fine and that it's no big deal, then starting to criticize others' love of meat. The others try to be polite and even attempt to spin the conversation to naturally bounce off her statements. They ask about her diet and how she gets her protein, and when she begins moralizing about the wrongness of killing animals, one guy even offers that he too used to be squeamish about the blood and violence of meat until he started going to the supermarket instead of a butcher. Delphine gets more and more self-righteous, however, her tone never becoming accusatory but the pleasantness in her voice taking on a passive-aggressiveness that so utterly ruins the vibe that Rohmer can only throw to the next dated intertitle when she finally shuts up, eager to move past this faux pas.

Where dialogue typically serves to bring out a character's being in Rohmer's films, Delphine's nervous sputtering only distance her further from others, the audience, and herself. Returning to that line about not expressing what she has to express, Delphine lacks the ability to communicate, even inadvertently, herself through her own asinine banter the way so many other Rohmer characters can reveal depths about themselves with even the most useless, self-absorbed proclamations. To truly bring out the pitiable person underneath her insufferable exterior, Rohmer uses his visuals. On a topless beach, Delphine walks around in a one-piece. As a tourist in the Alps, the presence of other tourists is made to feel overwhelming as Delphine almost instantly flees back to Paris, not even making out to the ex-boyfriend's cabin she rented.

One scene even devastates: Delphine happens upon some elderly people discussing the Jules Verne book from which the film takes it name, and the sunset phenomenon it describes. Delphine is too self-conscious to join them, so she sneaks around them and sits on a bench below their level, eavesdropping as the camera moves back up to stay with the group. The conversation is intoxicating, a light and enthusiastic chat about a book they all enjoy that becomes touching when the man sitting among the women explains the scientific reasons behind the green flash and makes it sound even more poetic and otherworldly than Verne's prose. But the ever-present awareness of Delphine sitting silently by herself down below, and the implication that the shots up-top are her imagined integration into this group as just another one of the old friends, is acutely sad.

Rivère also sells that sadness through her body acting. Delphine cries often in this movie, but she reveals the contours of her sadness in Rivière's subtle agony in social situations. Near the end of the film, in Biarritz, Delphine meets a Swedish woman, Lena (Carita), who casually sunbathes topless next to the well-covered Parisienne. They hit it off enough to head to lunch together, where Lena attempts to spark a double date with two men checking them out. In a moment painfully true to my own behavior in similar scenarios, Rivière crumbles as Delphine does not become a part of the group but instead bears witness to Lena's calm around the two men and the trading of pleasantries and come ons. Rohmer's camera slowly zooms in on Rivière's face as the situation becomes unbearable and captures her near-breakdown. Rivière starts fidgeting, unable to look anyone in the eye and holding her hand to her temple as a means of shielding her eyes from the source of her misery. Her whole body tenses with the strain of not voicing her pain, and she looks around for an escape before suddenly standing up and running out. It is the best piece of acting I've yet seen in a Rohmer film, an utterly silent communication of a character's deep foibles and insecurities and one I'm so used to acting out myself I could hardly stand to watch this moment.

The proverb that opens this entry in Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series is Rimbaud's "Ah! Let the time come/When hearts are enamored!" For Delphine, that "Ah!" is not a poetic invocation but a despairing plea. Yet, on her way back to Paris one last time, Delphine meets a young man who shares her love for Dostoevsky and with whom she can confide some of her insecurities. Delphine, so unwilling to take risks or be around strangers, decides on a whim to cancel her return and instead travel with this man on his own vacation. Rohmer culminates this sudden emergence of humanity with a final scene of the new pair witnessing the rare green ray, a cosmic acknowledgment of Delphine's belated openness to the world that would be a contrivance in anyone else's hands but is a celebration in Rohmer's. The director devotes the entire film to patiently dismantling the protagonist's weak excuses for her isolation, yet in letting Delphine find a foothold to society through the perfect connection she always wanted, he betrays an empathy and care for her that solidifies The Green Ray a work of rich, gentle humanism.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)

Néstor Almendros' natural-lit cinematography casts the Lake Annecy setting of Claire's Knee in summer tones, warm but not too hot, offset by a breeze that practically infuses the frame. The crystal clear water (rigorously maintained by environmental protections), near the base of the Alps that separate this region from Switzerland, has a breathtaking beauty that Almendros presents as the ultimate escape. Yet the great cinematographer also adds a slight but nagging sense of discomfort to this perpetual sunbath, making the cozy warmth of the frame as stifling and dulling as it is revitalizing. Later in the film, the one character mature enough to see outside the sick interweaving of lust and self-justification that occurs on the banks of the lake has the insight to call the place "smothering."

Jerôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), a diplomat engaged to be married, takes an extended vacation in this area to celebrate his last days of bachelorhood. While boating on the lake, he spots Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old friend and possibly flame who lives nearby. Catching up, Aurora remarks her surprise that this womanizer would settle down, but Jerôme maintains he's changed. "I don't look at the ladies anymore," he promises, though like the one-woman moralizing of Jean-Louis Trintignant's protagonist in My Night at Maud's, this proclamation has an air of desperation to it, a verbal talisman being waved about to ward off evil temptation. But Aurora, a novelist whose latest, unfinished story involves a fantastical scenario she invented for a Jerôme-like character, needs to him to stray in order to figure out how to finish her story.

Her plan, in keeping with the narrative she wrote up until the incomplete book's end, is to get Jerôme to seduce a young girl and see what happens so she can come up with an ending. Naturally, this deeply complicates the morality in this particular Moral Tale. Where My Night at Maud's brought in male moral superiority in the realm of sex under the microscope, Claire's Knee compounds the self-delusion and vicarious thrill of sexual desire and fealty. Aurora, who admits to wooing some of the younger boys in the area but stopping herself, gets several kinds of secondhand pleasure from steering Jerôme into a dalliance, while Jerôme gets the opportunity to return to his old ways and justify himself by attributing any philandering to a mere acting-out of the part he's been assigned.

On their own, Jerôme and Aurora provide such rich, natural psychology and character that they could propel their own movie. The emptiness of Jerôme's engagement is communicated through the photograph of his fiancée that he carries around. As frozen in a formal pose, the woman looks ridiculously arch, as if Rohmer cut out a film still of a Hitchcock ice queen and passed it off as a portrait. The actual photograph itself is a joke, not an intimate, pocket-sized picture of a loved one but a large, glossy print that looks like the sort of picture kept on a wall. The only way it could ever connote a relationship is by resting in a frame on the cluttered nightstand of an elderly couple for whom marriage has become merely another part of life, not a joyous declaration of love. Aurora, for her part, admits to a desire for so many men that she paradoxically winds up alone and chaste.

But this is not only their movie, and the introduction of the teenage girls only further deepens this twisted sexual tale. Aurora intends to sic Jerôme on Laura, her landlady's daughter and therefore always nearby. Béatrice Romand may not play the titular girl, but she instantly seizes the film from the hands of the adults, and she retains it when Laurence de Monaghan's half-sister entires the picture later. Hers is such a miraculous performance that, despite the ensemble nature of the movie and its entangled psychological urges and compulsions,

Romand's Laura is the picture of dissatisfied, directionless but driven adolescence. She's shy and forward at once, clearly smitten by this bearded, middle-aged gentleman and so embarrassed that her mother will say something to embarrass her that she ends up making even bigger scenes trying to head off mild mortification. She's smart, but not in that empty, false way that movie children are precocious, eerily spitting an adult's words out of a child' or teenager's mouth. Her intelligence is flecked by a naïveté she recognizes and wants to correct. She even self-diagnoses her attraction to Jerôme, and older men in general, as a product of lacking a father figure in her life. In the same monologue, Romand displays a stunning maturity, complaining of her mother's advice and admonishments while already seeing ahead to when she will find the wisdom and reason in those statements. She also notes her unhappiness at a time most call the best years of one's life. But that only means she's destined to go on to something better.

Laura is so adult, in fact, that Jerôme cannot truly fall for her. Both Aurora's story and his baser desires require him to seek more malleable flesh, and so he leaves this girl, wiser than anyone else in the movie alone. When I watched My Night at Maud's, I was struck by Rohmer's approach to POV shots. Even when the shot itself was not a literal approximation of what Jean-Louis saw, the frame generally communicated his frame of mind. The same is true of Claire's Knee and Jerôme perspective, particularly in how he views the film's two teenagers. Laura, so mature that Jerôme has no interest in her, appears in long-shot long takes that see her as she is, letting Romand's incredible performance fully blossom. There's a respectful tone to shots of Laura, as if the camera itself were impressed by her. Jerôme, as he tells Aurora later, "forces himself" to kiss Laura to test both her attraction and spark his own (for the sake of the novel, of course), and his own repulsion to the act is registered in the frame.

And then, after this gross kiss and Romand's incredible, self-analyzing monologue, Rohmer cuts to the arrival of Claire. Laura literally walked into frame as her introduction, a drifting pan lolling over to capture her walking home and meeting Jerôme. It's a lethargic, non-sexual entrance, one that forecasts the man's disinterest in her and her own naturalistic character. We meet Claire, on the other hand, in a bikini. Compared to her half-sister, Claire is shown in briefer takes, more subjective glimpses even in Rohmer's naturally longer takes. The camera eye, whether it is literally capturing Jerôme's line of sight or not, always highlighting the titular knee. Jerôme can delude himself all he wants—and he does, at length, around Aurora—but Rohmer gives away his obsession, and the fetishized body part the diplomat thinks will let him get out his lust without committing any sin fills the frame even without full close-ups.

Yet as the camera reflects Jerôme's lust for the girl, the audience is free to see how boring Claire really is. Where Laura, and her new, lanky beau (Fabrice Luchini), are clearly not at their peak, Claire and her six-packed boyfriend Gilles (Gérard Falconetti) look like the prom king and queen. Neither is stupid, but Claire and Gilles don't have that restlessness that can drive the other young pair to bigger and better things. Molly Haskell is quite right in saying that Claire will becoming less interesting as she grows older while Laura will only become even more fascinating, but that sentiment omits how dull she already is.

Haskell also summarizes Rohmer brilliantly when she notes that he doesn't reduce his women to his men's neuroses. What makes Maud's so striking is how Jean-Louis' attempts to reduce Maud and Françoise do not work, how even the frame's subtle alignment to his point of view cannot cast these two real, complex human beings into his simple-minded Madonna/whore complex. The characters in Claire's Knee have even more going on, the philosophical ruminations of Maud's replaced with a full concentration on character. Aurora, who stands above Jerôme, and Laura, who stands outside his sphere, certainly escape the reductive fetishes of Jerôme's pathetically self-justified desire.

But even Claire, who gets the least chance to express herself, is not merely an object to which Jerôme can pin his fetishes. He concocts a disgusting, childish plan that involves telling Claire about Gilles kissing another girl so he can comfortingly pat the knee he loves so dearly, but as the camera zooms in on Claire's face as she receives this news, she manages to wrest control of the camera away from Jerôme, and as he rubs her knee with mock care, a look of thoughtfulness and repulsion on her face gives the first full impression of her own perspective. Jerôme leaves the lake retreat having sickeningly convinced himself of performing a "good deed" in non-sexually getting out his own lust, giving Aurora an end to her story, and, no less importantly, getting Claire away from that awful boy. But as the latter note of satisfaction, and Claire's subsequent, film-closing action, suggest that she, not Jerôme, will move on from this encounter while he'll wretchedly think of it forever.

Rohmer's dialogue continues to be a marvel, but so too does his direction. The aforementioned approach to an extended point-of-view framing is a subjectivity unlike which I have ever seen. Rohmer is also a master of the shot/reverse shot, breaking the setup from its pat rhythms by cutting not based on turn-taking dialogue patterns but mood. He cuts to get reactions, which are subtly, naturally presented rather than stylized for effect, creating an arhythmic shot pattern that nevertheless feels more logical than the stilted design of so many shot/reverse shot scenes. Rohmer also knows when to hold a shot for great effect. When Jerôme continues a camp leader's admonishment of Claire and Gilles for disturbing the local campers, Laura enters and the shot rests on her as she argues back at this guest presuming to tell her half-sister what to do. By remaining on Romand's teasing, confrontational face and leaving Jerôme's comebacks to waft in from off-screen, Rohmer only further emphasizes his weak arguments and his mental inferiority to this vibrant young woman. And I'd be remiss not to mention the wit of the editing, especially as it applies to the intertitles with dates on them; the funniest gag in the film involves Jerôme pretending to slip so he can steady himself on Claire's knee as the shot instantly cuts to the next day.

"Insignificant characters can inspire good stories," Aurora says as she describes making a novel about Jerôme, but the backhanded compliment could describe Rohmer's own approach to storytelling. Fundamentally, the narrative arc consists of the gradual evolution of Jerôme's proud declaration that he is through looking at women to his modified contention that looking is fine, so long as there's no touching, or none of a certain kind of touching. Yet Claire's Knee offers such depth of character and, for all the talking, such a great many things left unsaid, that Rohmer's story is not merely good but magnificent. Gene Hackman might have compared the act of watching a Rohmer film to that of seeing paint dry, but the delicate complexity with which Rohmer implicates, critiques, but does not judge his characters is quickly proving to me to be as compelling in its own way as the most thrilling and conceptual of Godard's work.