Movie Enthusiast Issue 28: “The Secret Progressivism of This Old French Film Will Shock You,” and other fictions
Previously on Movie Enthusiast, I mentioned that I was watching Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Brief background: Rohmer was one of the editors of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, from the era of fellow editors Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and others who hopped the border between film criticism and filmmaking; you know them better as the founders of the French New Wave. The Six Moral Tales are a series of films Rohmer made in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They’re so called because they investigate the concept of moral reasoning—how an individual creates moral frameworks for himself to justify certain courses of action, behaviors, or non-behaviors—and not because the films are interested in moralizing per se.
Last week I watched Tale #4, La Collectionneuse (“The Collector”), the first of these films to be shot in color and the first, so far, to make very exaggerated use of first-person narration. Voiceover is a defining characteristic of each of Rohmer’s Moral Tales but it’s only in La Collectionneuse, where it is so present and so invasive, that we really get a sense for what it can do. The film, in the way of French films from the ’60s, doesn’t especially care about giving the viewers that much of a plot; all you need to know is that three averagely good-looking friends, two men and a woman, spend the summer at the woman's country estate, frolicking around on the beach, smoking joints in the drawing room, reading Rousseau under the pear tree. Our narrator is intent on getting the woman to fall for him, and on keeping her from the hands of his other male friend. By the movie's end, however, the perspective that's been forced upon us by his obtrusive voiceovers is finally exposed as the flawed and limited thought process it is: the woman gets what she wants and the man is made to realize that his self-justification was grounded in self-delusion.
After I finished watching this one, I came across a short, positive review of it that calls La Collectionneuse a progressive work for its empowering treatment of its sole female character by way of thwarting the myopic point of view of its central male character. I can get behind the female-empowerment-rah-rah part of this review, but the idea that La Collectionneuse should be considered foremost a progressive work gives me pause. Éric Rohmer did, after all, very famously break from Cahiers du cinéma because the increasingly-leftward tilt of the journal and its writers was at odds with his conservative Catholicism.
This strain of movie-reviewer logic comes up on my radar often enough that I feel the need to do some parsing of the fallacy at work. Let’s see if I can put into a formula how this critic arrived at his conclusion about Rohmer’s progressivism (bear with my rusty logic skills):
Because I am progressive/aligned with progressive causes, I do not like conservative things.*
*I’m assuming, for now, that the critic has some preconceived conception of what constitutes the conservative and is not working from some universally agreed-upon definition.I liked this movie x.*
*You might also write this statement as “I thought this movie x was good.”This movie x is progressive, because if it were motivated by any sort of conservative thinking I wouldn’t have liked it/thought it was good.
Sounds a bit like affirming the consequent to me!
When I brought up Rohmer in my last newsletter, I did so in the context of Alex Ross Perry’s new film. I have seen but one film by Perry—2011’s The Color Wheel—which was enough to tell me all I need to know about this guy and his worldview (the movie is essentially one long Aristocrats joke where the punchline is “incest, LOL!” Perry obviously has talent, to be able to pull it off, but…yeah no thanks). Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I went and read an interview Perry gave about his movie and, while I didn’t necessarily have any of my opinions of the director invalidated, I was most flabbergasted by the interviewer, who compared a scene in The Color Wheel to Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan and then went out of his way to call Perry’s film “an exposure of [Stillman’s] films’ underlying conservative values and the way otherwise astute critics are willing to give those values a pass.” (Perry seemed to concur with his read on Stillman.)
“Otherwise astute”? The whole framing of that statement strikes me as bizarre, and seems to follow the same logic I delineated above. “Critics whose opinions I think are sharp are slipping with regard to Stillman because his movies espouse conservative values, which ought to make any self-respecting progressive film critic dislike this movie” (and, as we all know, all film critics worth their salt are progressives or leftists because the right doesn’t fund the right brain and/or conservatism is inherently incompatible with nuance—as I once overheard a film critic claim on Twitter; don’t worry, I gave her some Tarkovsky as homework. Can you tell I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this?)
I’d like to think it could very well be possible to split one’s affinities between certain progressive causes and ways of understanding the world and certain conservative ones, but in the world of film criticism at least this seems like a lost cause I’m trying to fight for.
With the Rohmer example but also a bit with the Stillman example, I think the real problem we’re witnessing here is a poverty of imagination. In Rohmer’s case, the orthodox Catholicism that seems to guide his filmmaking (just watch My Night at Maud’s, Moral Tale #3) doesn’t factor into the conversation. If it did, perhaps critics would be less willing to label his work as progressive, given that, despite the overt liberality of his filmmaking—empowering women by emasculating men, vis-à-vis exposing the flaws of their thinking; frankly depicting the anything-goes sexuality of the ’60s in France—his films are, at root, the works of a first and foremost Catholic artist grappling with a Catholic framework for understanding the world. But if our only understanding of Christianity is some vaguely-defined and generally-agreed-upon-to-be-bad-and-backwards repressive, moralizing force, then of course we’re never going to recognize a truly Christian filmmaker when his movies are staring us right in the face.
We will return in March after the Oscars with your usual roundup of articles, news, interviews, and movie posters. Two quick news items for this week:
Jack Nicholson is coming out of retirement to film the American remake of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, the three-hour-long German “comedy” that took the highbrow film world by storm last year. Kristen Wiig will costar. Wiig initially tried to get Bill Murray on board for the film but he…uh…kept forgetting to respond to her emails or something. Sounds like Bill.
Lucrecia Martel’s long-awaited Zama, an adaptation of the Argentine existentialist masterpiece (it’s that country’s The Stranger) finally has a trailer. It’s likely to premiere out-of-competition at Cannes this May.