Full Moon in Paris or Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune belongs to Eric Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs series. It is based on the proverb “He who has two women loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind.”
Louise is restless with her stable adoring lover, who wants her to stay in and be with him. She feels he is taking away her youth.
She also feel that she is missing out on experience. She has rarely been alone. She has never known the pain of loneliness. She has never loved more than she has been loved.
Louise rents an apartment in Paris to be alone, and revels in the rhythms of solitude. She wins hard -won absences from her lover to be in Paris, to go dancing with her Platonic lovers, and then, despite her assurances to “go all the way” with a man she picks up at a party.
Along the way, she is breaking the heart of her stable, decent lover, who just wants to be a family man in the suburbs. “Have an affair too,” she advises. “I wouldn’t care.”
At the movie’s end, he does; she does.
It’s the story of the growing-up of a mixed-up woman.
I like Rohmer’s films because they are slow explorations of the psyche of his characters, and this interests me as much as it does him.
And they are in French. I might possibly get restless if they were English films, or dubbed. But I have been learning French intensively for the last two years, and hearing it, understanding it, that language like music, gives me great pleasure and great joy.
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And here is an interesting obituary of Eric Rohmer who died at 89
Eric Rohmer obituary
Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new wave
In Arthur Penn’s intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman’s hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.”
Behind that exchange lies a jab at Hollywood’s mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is literature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.
Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts, fuelled by his own sparkling dialogue, to wag the tail of his movies. While acknowledging the brilliance, Hollywood punditry never failed to complain that Mankiewicz characters simply talked too much.
Rohmer, who has died aged 89, pushed even further into this disputed territory. The oldest of the group of critics associated with the film review Cahiers du Cinéma, who launched the French new wave in the late 1950s, Rohmer had (writing initially under his real name of Maurice Schérer) established impeccable credentials for a future film-maker. Among the objects of his admiration were Dashiell Hammett, Alfred Hitchcock (about whom he wrote a monograph with Claude Chabrol), Howard Hawks, and above all FW Murnau, the great visual stylist of the German expressionist era (on whose version of Faust he published a doctoral thesis). As a film-maker, however, he turned instead to such literary-philosophical luminaries as Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Choderlos de Laclos and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
His first feature, Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo), completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the early new wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted into debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax. In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer’s later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on demonstrating how Paris itself becomes an objective correlative to the hero’s state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a welcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realises that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation.
With Le Signe du Lion failing at the box office, Rohmer retreated into television where, while working on educational documentaries, he hatched his daring conception for a series of Six Moral Tales. Variations on a theme, each film would deal with “a man meeting a woman at the very moment when he is about to commit himself to someone else”. Furthermore, as Rohmer later observed, the films would deal “less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it”.
Made for TV, the first two films in the cycle, La Boulangère de Monceau (The Baker of Monceau, 1962) and La Carrière de Susanne (Suzanne’s Career, 1963), shot in black and white and running for 26 and 60 minutes respectively, were too cramped in every respect to be more than clumsy foretastes of what was to come.
Completing the series for the cinema with La Collectionneuse (The Collector, 1966), Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night With Maud, 1969), his international breakthrough Le Genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee, 1970) and L’Amour l’Après-midi (Love in the Afternoon, 1972), Rohmer found exactly what he needed in the bigger screens, longer running times, more expansive locations and availability of colour (actually in black and white, My Night With Maud uses the snowy landscapes of Clermont-Ferrand as a perfect counterpoint to its chilly Pascalian thematic). Backed by the richly sensuous role now played by the visuals, the somewhat arid intellectual dandyism of the first two films flowered into a teasingly metaphysical exploration of human foibles.
Le Genou de Claire, for instance, perhaps the most accomplished of the six films, is about a French diplomat, on the brink of both middle age and marriage, enjoying a brief lakeside vacation at Lake Annecy in France. Seduced by his idyllic summery surroundings, he begins casting an appreciative eye over the young women on show. Innocent dalliance, he assures himself, proclaiming that his courtly fancy has been captured by the perfection of the eponymous heroine’s knee. Deeper down, though, as he comes to realise when a pert and pretty teenager responds to his casual flirtation by remarking on his resemblance to her father, lies a less palatable truth: there, but for the grace of God, goes a dirty old man.
Rohmer followed his Six Moral Tales with two similar cycles, identical in style, method and accomplishment. First came Comedies and Proverbs: La Femme de l’Aviateur (The Aviator’s Wife, 1980), Le Beau Mariage (A Good Marriage, 1981), Pauline à la Plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1982), Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Full Moon in Paris, 1984), Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray, 1986) and L’Ami de Mon Amie (My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, 1987). Then, Tales of the Four Seasons: Conte de Printemps (A Tale of Springtime, 1989), Conte d’Hiver (A Winter’s Tale, 1992), Conte d’Eté (A Summer’s Tale, 1996) and Conte d’Automne (An Autumn Tale, 1998).
In between times, Rohmer also made a number of non-series films, most notably two literary adaptations which are rather different in their visual approach. Die Marquise von O… (The Marquise of O, 1976) adopts a severe neo-classical style in transposing Heinrich von Kleist’s teasing early-19th-century novella about the social furore occasioned when a chaste young widow suffers a pregnancy which she insists can only be the result of an immaculate conception. Perceval le Gallois (1978), on the other hand, toys joyously with cut-out sets and false perspectives to invest his adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th-century Arthurian tale with the faux-naif aspects of an illuminated manuscript.
Both remain entirely consistent with the body of Rohmer’s work, a highly original and endlessly fascinating attempt to render the interior exterior by mapping out the maze of misdirections that bedevil communications between the human heart and mind.
Rohmer guarded his private life fiercely – giving different versions of his date of birth and real name on different occasions, so that it is difficult to be certain of the truth. He was married in 1957 to Thérèse Barbet, and they had two sons.
When the painter Marie Laurenen illustrates Hessel’s poetry, Roche edges into their intimacy; the two friends share women without rivalry. But when Hessel meets Helen Grund, a painter of Prussian origins, Franz advises Roche, “Not this one.”
Meanwhile, Roche wants to stabilize his passion for Helen: he wants a child and a book from her. He wants Helen to write a diary; he wants a love described for the first time from two viewpoints. Helen’s Diary is a marvel of harshness, violent, a profusion of senses. Roche addresses the principles of amorous gestures, Helen the heat. “I clearly felt the margins of my heart,” she writes. In pain after discovering that Roche had just possessed her sister, Helen notes the need “to touch something I love with my finger. The letters of Rilke,” whom she knew. Then Roche violates her, and love is rekindled. To read both diaries together is a revelation, like the 1933 love stories by Leautaud and Marie Dormoy, orderly divided between bookkeeping and the maudlin.
