Rohmer at 100
Writing
Today for Plough I wrote about Éric Rohmer in honor of his centenary (which happened back in March, a uniquely terrible time to pitch editors about anything other than current events). Here’s the opening paragraph to entice you to go read the whole thing:
Maurice Schérer wasn’t interested in movies. Born in 1920 to a Catholic, middle-class family in Tulle, the young Frenchman preferred literature and theater. He loved his Latin and Greek classes so much that he staged a school production of one of Virgil’s Eclogues. He moved to Paris to prepare for the qualifying exams to teach classics past the secondary school level, but failed them twice. He tried writing: at twenty-four he published, under a pen name, a novel, Élisabeth, which sold so poorly that his publisher declined to work with him again. Alas. Schérer settled for substitute teaching classics at high schools in the suburbs; an unremarkable career, yet one that contented his mother, always concerned that he might fall in with disreputable Parisian artists and bohemians. She died in 1970 having no reason to believe that her son was anything other than a schoolteacher – certainly not the internationally acclaimed filmmaker Éric Rohmer.
While I watched or rewatched as many of his 25 features as I could in my research, I intentionally skewed more toward biography than film criticism in the finished piece. Rohmer was nearly 50 when he really got started as a filmmaker, so I thought it was important to bring to light what the first half of his life was like in order to better understand his creative output in the second half of it (and, of course, to better contextualize his Catholicism). In this I was greatly aided by the thorough biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, published in English in 2016, and a collection of his film criticism published by Cambridge University Press.
The former book in particular is brimming with amusing anecdotes that didn’t have a place in my piece. My favorite: on the set of La Collectionneuse, producer Barbet Schroeder hired an Italian woman from the riviera town they were filming in as the caterer. (You can catch a quick glimpse of her in a scene where the leads are helping her unload and wash produce in the kitchen of the villa where most of the story takes place.) Turns out all she could make was minestrone soup, which she served the cast and crew for every meal the whole length of the shoot. On the last day of filming, Schroeder went in to town to buy a leg of lamb for a more celebratory final repast together. He entrusted it to their chef, who served them…minestrone soup one last time. After dinner Schroder asked her what happened to the lamb. “Didn’t you notice?” she replied. “I chopped it up and put it in the soup.”
There has been a lot of news in the film world in the last week—the Academy’s new Best Picture diversity regulations, the controversy over the Netflix film Cuties—that I am simply rather uninterested in. For an overview of the former, I recommend Alissa Wilkinson, and for competing perspectives on the latter from people who have actually watched the film, I recommend Joel Mayward and, if you read French, this review by a Black French blogger. My two cents: (cent 1) Don’t sexualize children! For any reason! Ever! and (cent 2) Stop having bad-faith arguments!
New York Film Festival starts this weekend, virtually, and you shall be hearing more about it from me soon.