Rohmer’s Characters

According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image proposed by the camera’ (Crisp 1988:88). But what this objection misses is that the absence adds a measure of complexity to attitudes towards the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs. There might well be less identification with the characters in this series than there was in the Moral Tales, but there is certainly more engagement with them. They become much less ironic than their counterparts in the Moral Tales, and the audience is left instead to come to terms with these characters who are frequently irritating (Anne in The Aviator’s Wife and Delphine in The Green Ray must be two of the more annoying heroines of recent films) but who are perhaps all the more human precisely because they are stuck in an empirical situation about which they have only incomplete knowledge yet in which they seek to stumble across the ‘real life’ for which they so deeply yearn. Whereas the encounter with the characters in the Moral Tales is largely abstract identification, that with the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs is much more engagingly compassionate (this is the catch of a loss of identification; the characters are always other, and therefore they can be the subject of an empathetic engagement), for the simple reason that they are seen to make mistakes and embarrassing leaps of faith, and are inclined to take as destiny what is in fact only an accident, in a world from which they can never escape. Unlike the retrospective narrators, who imposed a false certainty and confidence on the story of the Moral Tales, the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs do not know what is going to happen next, and neither does the audience.

Tester, Keith. Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 119.

I don’t remember exactly why I marked this passage. I know it bore some relation to thoughts at the time I was reading the book (a few weeks ago now).

Tags: characters, film, identification, narration, rohmer

Related posts

• Series and Repetition (0)
• Rohmer’s Style (0)
• Welles quote (0)
• Telephone Text (2)
• Rohmer and Permutations (0)
• Mathews Brooklyn Rail Interview (0)
• Lynch on Catching Fish (0)
• Links for January 3rd through January 25th (2)
• Godard and constructive editing (0)
• Floating Weeds (3)