Men, Women, and the Limits of Desire: Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (Preview)
by Adam Bingham

My intent was to film not raw, unvarnished events but rather the account of them as given by one of the characters. The story, the selection and arrangement of the facts… happened to relate very clearly and specifically to the person relating them, independently of any pressures I might exert on that person. One of the reasons these tales are called “moral” is that they are effectively stripped of physical action: every-thing takes place in the narrator’s mind.

This statement is how Éric Rohmer characterized the approach to both cinema and morality in what would become both the foundation and touchstone series of his career. The so-called Six Moral Tales, comprised of both shorts and features that span a period of more than ten years, became a treatise on filmmaking as an intervention in the mores of contemporary life concerning love, relationships, and the complex ways that men and women relate both to each other and to themselves. It secured Rohmer’s name as synonymous with a specific type of film, one with an unobtrusive, observational style and an increasingly refined and rarefied approach to narrative as an extended, wry play on human subjectivity and interaction.

As can be seen in The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray box set of these films, both morality and cinema are here more loaded and complex terms than may initially be apparent. Indeed, perhaps a more apt title for the series would be six tales about morality, a title that suggests more clearly Rohmer’s desire to question and probe his protagonists and their individual proclivities, attitudes, and actions. There is no universal schema governing behavior, no code of conduct or of personal or social etiquette. The characters themselves seem only to grope toward an idea of what morality means to them, to concretize this conception or not, to adhere to their standards or cast them to the wind; but to us, the viewers, anything we take away from each tale is mere supposition, perhaps imposition, a mirror onto our own morality as much as a window onto theirs. For the men who invariably take center stage in these films there is intention, (self)-justification, and (self)-deception; and from the liminal space between action and reflection emerges a deep-seated conflict that is couched in terms of what is moral, but which tends to flounder in the face of their masculine fervor.

The complexities attendant on this approach, however, are all too easy to overlook since each film is deceptively straightforward and built around variations on a theme. It is a complexity that, as noted, encompasses an implied inquiry into the possibilities of cinema, central to which is a tension owing to the fact that each of the six moral tales had in fact been written as a short story or novella prior to the making of the films. These stories, translated and reprinted in a 262-page paperback edition as part of the Criterion box set, seem to have been adapted quite directly. Indeed, the novellas could be transcripts of the films, which is significant given the criticism that the latter are overly literary, verbose, what Alfred Hitchcock would perhaps have derisively termed “photographs of people talking.”

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. This assertion misses the use value of juxtaposing literature and cinema as artistic practices with their own means and manners. Molly Haskell (one of six critics whose essays are featured in the box set’s companion booklet) has talked of Rohmer’s values and attitudes as being closer to the nineteenth-century novel than that of twentieth-century cinema; and truthful though this argument may in part be, it does rather tend to essentialize these concepts when the gulf between them is not in fact as pronounced as it ostensibly seems, at least as far as the characters of the moral tales are concerned (and one should not confuse a director’s attitudes with those of his or her protagonists)…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2