Eric Rohmer

      Nadja à Paris (1964), directed by Eric Rohmer, comes across as a documentary, about thirteen minutes long.  Nadja Tesich, part Yugoslav, part American, wrote the narration.  She attends the city university in Paris.  She offers viewpoints on the culture to be experienced, bookshops, open air cafes, a quiet park she frequents, her bare feet photographed by Nestor Almendros, walking in flowing water in a concrete channel.

     Her light step resembles a rabbit moving with ease across a lawn.  She seems to weigh fifty pounds, or it seems gravity doesn't affect her like it does others.  She attracts a lot of attention from boys and men.  She gets hit on often.  She breezes through it all.

     Her narration gives the impression of a true to life account, but is it?  I don't know.  Unfamiliar with the circumstances leading to the making of this film, I wonder if Rohmer treated the material fictionally, especially in his handling of the images.  Faces of Parisians, of those from other countries studying at the university.  She's in Paris, she says, to write her dissertation on Marcel Proust.  She lives in a college lifestyle separated from the world's problems.  It's 1964, Paris is four years away from 1968's general strike.

     Rohmer's out-in-the-street filmmaking here flows naturally, a host of people entering and exiting the frame.  One middle-aged man talking for a bit (no sound) with Nadja in a bar stands out as a remarkable face, as someone possessing natural screen charisma, but I suspect this was his only film.

     The film brings the subject out of a studio setting, the filmmaker showing Paris, the experience of a young woman finding the great city for herself, but seemingly aloof from it.  She comes from Tito's Yugoslavia, a differently flavored place, but a country then entering its own period of cinematic experimentation, influenced somewhat by the French filmmakers of the 1960s, like Eric Rohmer.

Vic Neptune