Autumn Tale
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Along with Claude Chabrol, with whom he once wrote the first book-length critical study of Alfred Hitchcock in any language, Rohmer stands in opposition to the other critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave in his absolute fidelity to the way people speak and to the quality of a particular place and time– specific regions, cities, towns, seasons, and times of day. For Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and the late Francois Truffaut, pursuing a particular mythology and metaphysics is an essential part of filmmaking. Chabrol pursues these things a little–deriving them most often from the mysteries and thrillers he frequently uses as sources–but Rohmer is far too interested in the real to go along with such hocus-pocus. The form that seems to interest him the most is the tale or the fable, conceived as an 18th-century form of crystalline elegance, and the iconography that engages him doesn’t refer to the sort of allegory he admires in the work of Hitchcock or F.W. Murnau (whose Faust was the subject of his dissertation) but to the particular way light falls across a familiar, everyday setting.
Maybe the implicit political conservatism of Rohmer’s realism has made me distrustful. Yet I confess my favorite of all his films might be described as the most reactionary (and the least realistic)–his 1978 Perceval le Gallois, a medieval musical that feels a bit like a western, and a cogent illustration of his stated conviction that a true preservation of the past ultimately adds up to a kind of modernity. I once asked Rohmer how he reconciled his realist aesthetic with the artificiality of a studio film like Perceval, and he answered in part by recalling Andre Bazin’s defense of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as a realist work: that at least the dirt in the film was real. For a director whose sense of realism is more primitive than Bazin’s–though it’s obviously indebted to Bazin’s theorizing on the subject–it was an apt response. In Perceval, I would argue, the 12th century emerges as real, and this isn’t a compliment I’d make as readily about any other film with a medieval setting–Dreyer’s Passion, Carne and Prevert’s Les visiteurs du soir, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake. The merit of Rohmer’s realism in Perceval is that it brings something otherwise dead and forgotten to life–not because Rohmer’s imagination is especially rich but because he sees no alternative to his literalism, even if it makes some audiences laugh in disbelief.
The story develops in leisurely fashion, gathering momentum and purpose as it proceeds, until by the end you may feel like cheering. Some of the characters and relationships seem peculiarly, even quintessentially French: the propensity of French professors to become involved with their students makes the scenes between Rosine and Etienne almost archetypal; disapproving American viewers may be surprised at how much the precocious Rosine controls the romantic impulses of her mentor, who’s roughly twice her age. (She seems equally in control of Leo, whom she clearly regards as a stopgap.)
