Eric Rohmer, 1920 - 2010

If the passing of a young talent comes as a shock to admirers and followers, the passing of an aged master may be less surprising but no less disheartening. When word of filmmaker Eric Rohmer's death this week at age 89 became known, one could only respond with a bitter smile. The smile recognized his accomplished and thankfully healthy long life, which allowed him to spend nearly the past sixty years crafting personal cinema. The bitterness acknowledged that he may well have spent yet another decade adding to his work if given the chance. Prolific and profound until the end, he leaves us with an amazing contribution of twenty-seven full-length works, plus television and shorter films, all stamped with his individuality and none marked by compromise or overtures to marketplace trends. To work successfully and prolifically in one's chosen medium for sixty years would be a triumph for any artist - to do so in the cutthroat world of the cinema is nearly miraculous.

I have special feelings for Rohmer's cinema because it was through him, and specifically through his 1970 film Le genou de Claire / Claire's Knee, that I first discovered and fell in love with a certain type of arthouse cinema. It was college, sometime in my sophomore year, during a period in which I began scouring our university library's media collection for video cassettes (yep, that long ago) of intriguing movies. I had long been interested in what I had thought was serious cinema, which at that time primarily meant violent and morally ambiguous crime narratives and the like. Scorsese was a favorite, as was Michael Mann. Tarantino was a god. Kevin Smith seemed audacious. With the exception of Smith, who I now find unbearably smug and completely tone-deaf in his camera work, the above filmmakers are all serious, committed individuals working creatively, intelligently and doggedly in their line of work. But Claire's Knee was something else entirely. I'm not sure why I picked it up or what I thought it might offer - it could be (no, it was almost certainly) that the cover, with its perfectly framed bare leg of a coltish young woman on a ladder, and the older protagonist gazing up towards her bent knee, gave a hint of some decidedly continental eroticism that might become more pronounced in the final act. In fact, the eroticism was palpable throughout the entire film. Yet, it was eroticism of a type I'd never before witnessed or thought possible - an eroticism of glances and conversation.

Claire's Knee was dialogue-driven, yet not merely wordy. It was calm, but not complacent. It was complex, but not pretentiously so. To offer a brief synopsis is to risk making the film sound foolish or simply banal - an aging ladies' man on the brink of marriage travels to the Swiss border and Lake Annecy for a July vacation, in which his eye falls upon the charms of two tempting and ripe teenagers, the younger of whom is intrigued by this bearded rogue, the older of whom barely notices him. While the younger girl, Laura, is by far the more interesting and delightful of the two, our protagonist finds himself drawn to the slightly more sullen and traditionally beautiful (although slightly boring) Claire. Unwilling to derail his approaching marriage or perhaps simply fearful of rejection, he sets his sights on something more easily achieved than the girl's affections - her knee.

This type of storyline could easily lend itself to either broad comedy or pathetic tragedy. If left up to some Hollywood hack, no doubt the film might turn into a hysterical indictment of predatory lust or some kind of romantic comedy mush in which his fiancée shows up at the end and they fall back into each other's arms while the teenage temptresses grin knowingly. Rohmer chooses neither comedy nor tragedy. We may smirk at the deluded and foolish behavior of our unlikely protagonist, but most viewers would never think to condemn his actions. Indeed, he barely commits any action at all, and certainly doesn't wallow in crassness or mere leering. We simply watch with interest as he talks his way around his desires, while the women remain above it all, wise, insightful, toying and clever.

This film, like all of Rohmer's many films, revolve around what David Thompson has dubbed "modest action" - no sudden moves, no quick resolutions, just ideas, emotions, challenges and subtle thought patterns that unfold as gently as they do in real life. And yet there is tension in these films, even gripping tension, at times. We find ourselves caring deeply about these intelligent, flawed, unapologetically normal characters. At the same time, we gaze at the beauty on the screen, usually of young women but often the beauty of men as well. We wait for action, which rarely arrives. We find ourselves relieved that it does not.

This is a literary cinema. The majority of Rohmer's films were divided into structured tellings, such as "The Six Moral Tales," "Comedies and Proverbs" and "Tales of the Four Seasons". The moral tales were even written and released by Rohmer as a collection of short stories, and they are wonderful examples of short fiction. Yet Rohmer was not merely a novelist working in cinematic form or a great artist who chanced upon film and decided to use it as his medium. These are not filmed plays. Despite all the dialogue and the relative lack of action, Rohmer's films boast stunning settings and lush framing, and an often remarkable sense of place. The shimmering waters of Annecy, the brooding mountain ranges and the hazy July air are nearly characters in their own right throughout Claire's Knee (this, of course, has something to do with the wonderful cinematography of Nestor Almendros). Rohmer never settled for the lazy reliance on close-up face framing between speaking characters the way TV movies so often do. This may be a cinema of ideas, but to call it static is to miss a massive part of Rohmer's considerable appeal.

Perhaps my admiration for Rohmer stems from the fact that he always trusts us to watch, to ponder and to observe. Some of his films are long, many are intellectually taxing. But in response to our trust, he gives us images of utter loveliness, gentle humor, remarkable dialogue and a long career of remarkable consistency. Like Yasujiro Ozu, Rohmer offered film lovers his own world - Rohmer Land - a world instantly recognizable, that one can enter and re-enter any time one chooses. We should be grateful that he was given the opportunity to offer these cinematic gifts for as long as he did. I hesitate to say "Rest In Peace," because he seemed so at peace on this earth already.