intelligent young women, twisting sometimes painfully in or out of love. That's what French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who died today, made movies about. That's what I want to tell stories about in whatever form I can.
He had a talent for dialogue (given that I have to assume that through the translator), explorations of love and friendship; a taste for writing about women, misunderstandings, ambiguity and dancing.
That's why every few years I go on a kick of watching a bunch of his films. They pleased and engaged me. On the one hand I shall miss him, on the other there are still a few dozen films of his that I haven't seen yet.
I have a feeling I'll be renting two or three this week. The question is, which ones. I'm leaning toward La collectionneuse, Les rendez-vous de Paris, and/or Nadja à Paris.
In the memorial piece linked above, Roger Ebert writes
Rohmer's characters arrived at moral decisions in their lives, usually through romance, often with warm humor. Few directors have loved people more: Their quirks, weaknesses, pretensions, ideals, and above their hopes of happiness. In 27 features made between 1959 and 2007, not a single Rohmer character was a generic type. All were originals.
The choices were revealed through indirection, in films ostensibly about something else.
And then, quoting one of his own earlier writings,
"Rohmer is the romantic philosopher of the French New Wave, the director whose characters make love with words as well as flesh."
If you have to die, and if you have a gravestone, I should think you could do worse than to have that etched into it.
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