Eric Rohmer

1920-2010

When you finally dive into French New Wave, you eventually get to Eric Rohmer. You start with Godard or Truffaut. Which one? It's really circumstance. I started with Godard because Breathless was in a bargain bin at Best Buy during the height of my bulk DVD buying. DVD's were brand new, and for some reason, I had to have a lot of them. It could have easily been Truffaut instead. It's circumstance. Who recommends French New Wave to you, a Godard guy, or a Truffaut guy? Which DVD is in the bargain bin? What movie is IFC showing the night you give French New Wave a shot? Which movie is "watch now" on Netflix? You don't have time to wait for something to be delivered. It could be a lot of things. The thing is, your start is going to be one of the two. And then it's off to the other.

Rohmer comes some time after that. For me, it was after Melville too. Rohmer happened fourth. I suspect Rohmer comes fourth for a lot of people. And that's not a slight. It's just the natural order of things. Carl Perkins might be the best of Sun Records, but you're going to get to him after Elvis and Johnny Cash. That's just the way it goes. Rohmer's place in the French New Wave, is sort of like Carl Perkins. It's not the first name that's brought up, but it's still a very significant one. And since we all dig different things, for some, Rohmer is their guy, not the guys that routinely get mentioned before him.

Love in the Afternoon aka Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)

I always liked the American Chloe title better. For me, it's Chloe's movie, and I like to see her name in the title. You could also make the argument that it was never actually "love" in the afternoon. So there's that too. But most importantly, Chloe in the Afternoon just sounds better.

This was the first Rohmer flick I saw. I had no idea about his Six Moral Tales yet. I was just randomly picking a Rohmer movie to watch, and it happened to be this one. It was probably the title, now that I think about it. But I have to say, out of all of my first introductions to French New Wave directors, I responded the most to Chloe. Godard's Breathless left me a little flat after all it's hype, and while Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Melville's Le Samourai were movies I immediately loved, there was just something about Chloe.

I think it might have the Chloe character herself. In what I would later see as the norm in Rohmer's movies, because he took the time, a painful amount of time to some, to develop characters, a lot of times in lieu of worrying about plot, he was a master at creating characters we've never seen before. And Chloe was certainly that. It was this odd combination of sex goddess, and kid sister. She was constantly testing him. And being open about. "I know we're not friends. I was just testing you," she'd say. Chloe was unlike any character I had ever seen.
And I couldn't really tell you why. That was the beauty of Rohmer's characters. He was so involved in creating nuance and subtlety, that you recognize that something is different, but you can't really place your finger on what it is.

One thing that is interesting to me, a lot of people are going to experience an Eric Rohmer movie for the first time in the coming weeks. The news of his death, is probably the first time a lot of budding movie buffs have heard his name. They're going to be curious, they'll read In Memory's which praise his talents, and they're going to be renting, buying, streaming, Chloe in the Afternoon, and other Rohmer films like it. I'm sure his films will be just as polarizing as ever, and that's really exciting. Masters like Rohmer never really go away. Not even in death.