Tells the story of the French Revolution from the losing side, simultaneously exploring the illogical nature of royalist loyalty whilst making uprising itself something more chaotic and less empowering than a traditional hero narrative would allow for. The film is built around current political conversation, the knowledge of impending change (brought in by us as an audience) shading every scene with an intangible sense of inevitability. Rohmer's formal approach mirrors this dialectic between past and present, every single exterior shot rendered in gorgeously composed tableaux, the actors moving within these static backgrounds (each one hand-painted and then superimposed behind them) like abstract figures of life intruding on a classical painting. These expressionistic images are contrasted with the gorgeously designed interiors,…

(...) Este filme, de uma originalidade extraordinária, demonstrou duas coisas. A primeira é que Rohmer é até o fim um cineasta inovador, capaz das mais audaciosas experimentações formais. A segunda é que ele era não apenas um homem fundamentalmente de direita, o que nós sabemos há sessenta anos, mas também um monarquista fervoroso. Deste modo, e eu estou pessoalmente convencido disso, a vanguarda artística e a tradição podem andar juntas e inclusive o fazem mesmo com frequência. - Michel Marmin

(...) Há um personagem nos Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre de Goethe que diz: "Bem, você pode dizer o que quiser de mim, mas ninguém há de negar que sou um contemporâneo." Não vejo diferença entre esse personagem um tanto absurdo do…

"What times are we living in? Those "Enlightenment Philosophers" should open their eyes!"

This one is weird. I want to say that its almost sort of like Rohmer's Love and Friendship, except of course Whit Stillman is the one whose films are deeply indebted to Rohmer rather than the other way around, and this almost completely lacks any sense of humor whatsoever, which itself is rather odd considering that even when Rohmer's films aren't outright comedies per se, they at the very least usually have a certain droll irony to them, sorely missed here. Indeed, this may very well be the director's least characteristic work that I've seen, even compared to his other somewhat likeminded period pieces The Marquis of…

Una cortesana anodina condenada a la repetición de veladas mundanas insustanciales conoce gracias a la Revolución el vértigo de la vida. El peligro (a la que se somete soberanamente y sin razón, porque ni siquiera simpatiza con el tipo al que presta ayuda, por el que comete su acto de traición) la hace experimentar por primera vez una intensidad que su vulgar ociosidad (un ocio hecho a costa de los otros) le privaba. Todavía no consigue elevarlo a conciencia y sus habitus burgueses sólo le alcanzan para esgrimir una defensa protocolar de aquello en lo que en realidad ya no cree. Pero su vida ha sido tocada por la grandeza de la Revolución, es decir por una verdad ligada a…

Las arquitecturas de Éric Rohmer

Si la filmografía de Éric Rohmer —nombre artístico de Maurice Schérer— tiene un defecto, este residía hasta ahora en la homogeneidad quizá excesiva de su estilo y el muy elevado pero casi constante nivel de calidad alcanzado una y otra vez, con muy raros y muy relativos altibajos: no es grande la distancia que separa su mejor película de la menos buena. Se diría que apenas hay en su obra lugar para la sorpresa, pues alcanza cuanto se propone, tal vez al coste de aspirar a unos objetivos modestos. Consciente de sus límites y sus afinidades, nunca dispuesto a contrariar sus gustos ni sus principios, Rohmer escribe y realiza sus películas de tal modo que…

people need to stop sleeping on later rohmer. yeah, they're not as good as his finest films, although i could make an argument for Triple Agent, but still are markedly his, with all the good and the bad. the good being his treatment of dialogue, the back and forth between both main characters' feelings and the social context that comes between them, their elegant, complex but passionate arguments, how history is being witnessed instead of engaged with (the backdrops being flat, almost boring paintings filmed in a bland digital instead of film). the bad, of course, being his reactionary politics. one positive to take from that though, it's how he portraits the revolution as this tragic, almost sad thing that…

Rohmer's style doesn't lend itself to period material. His signature form of dialogue delivery and lack of camera movement makes the movie quite stilted. Even his best work is, but in a contemporary setting it doesn't really bother me. But add to it this weird choice of using digital approximations to period paintings as background and what you end up is a movie that is too inert, artificial and low-key theatrical to work. The setting just screams for air and movement but all we get is rooms and green screen. Without outdoors footage, it all doesn't amount to much more than a filmed community theatre production.

I have no issues with the royalist perspective of the film that some people…

The last line of the New York Times’s review of Eric Rohmer’s L’anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) claims that “If cinema had been around to capture the chaos of France in the 1790's, one imagines the result would look like something like this.” Does one really? It seems to me that the point of the film is precisely to remind us that, whatever the Revolutionary Terror looked like, it could not have looked like this. That is the point of the stagey, oil-painted backdrops and the look of the acting and direction — so like that of the much more formal styles of the French theatre of the period in which the film is set. In…