Rohmer and Rivette

     Some might think I've delved into obscure territory.  Writing reviews of short Rohmer and Rivette films from the late 1940s and 1950s.  Movies like fetuses of their masterpieces to follow in the 1960s and after.

     To be drawn to such films involves an interest on my part to fill out my knowledge of their work, just as I once watched an obscure Alfred Hitchcock short, Aventure malgache, made in 1944 in French, taking place in Madagascar with a collaborationist/Resistance theme.

     Rohmer, I've discovered, works at the level of ordinary human affairs.  His images in his color films seem to glow, as if the screen has become a series of paintings.  So beautiful are some of his images, the outdoor ones especially, with sunlight, I have felt myself weeping looking at them.

     In 1958, Rohmer made his third short film, Véronique et son cancre (Veronica and Her Dunce).  Alain Delrieu, acting in his only film, plays a young boy having trouble keeping up with his studies, so his mother (Stella Dassas) hires a tutor (Nicole Berger, the one experienced performer in the film with a fairly long acting career).  The tutor, Véronique, is young, pretty with worried eyes, wears clothes similar to Vera Miles's clothes in Hitchcock films from the same period.  

     The film details tutor's and pupil's nervous tics, her shoes dropping off and coming back on underneath the table where math and composition papers suffer from a lack of competent attention from the boy.

     She gets irritated with him a few times, becomes anxious about the passing of time, seems like she's thinking about a date with a man in the near future.  The boy doesn't care about his studies one bit.  Math is stupid, he can think of nothing to write for his composition, a page or two about how he spends his Saturdays.  

     In this instance of time off, he's with a beautiful young woman and maybe that's of greater interest. He drops his pencil and spends a moment on the floor looking at her legs.  The tutoring session is filled with no production along the lines of what school-related study is supposed to be about.

     Rohmer shoots the entire film inside a room of an apartment, plus the area by the front door.  The mother breezily leaves her son under the guidance of a stranger who fails, ultimately, at least this session, to make him feel any approach towards diligence in studious behavior.  The tutor herself is distracted, amused at times by the boy's antics but bored, too. 

     The film, in just eighteen minutes, illustrates a simple situation of a type of master and servant mini-drama.  The boy in the end seems more the master, for his teacher is unable to exert proper control, due perhaps to her youth and inexperience.

     The film ends with the tutor leaving, thanked nicely by the mother, while the boy goes back to his play, homework on the table, nothing accomplished.

     Le divertissement (Entertainment) from 1952, Jacques Rivette's third short film, is a forty-five minute dance of friends spending time together on a rooftop of an apartment building, the Eiffel Tower misty deep in the background of soft Parisian light.

     No one is named, although the version I saw lacked subtitles.  Title cards appear now and then covered in French sentences, so I was able to pick out some words I understood, but mostly I had to interpret the story through observing its images.

     The story's focus is a somewhat fey young brunette, paid excessive attention by the men, even to the point of causing their own girlfriends jealous moments.  One woman in particular, who seems to be the hostess of this party, looks out for the shy brunette whereas the three other women give her many surreptitious hostile looks or mock her behind her back, while simultaneously treating her like a great friend.

     The film shows an almost continuous movement of these people.  The men wear suits and ties, the women wear beautiful dresses, shoes, all of them with lovely hair arranged artfully.

     The rooftop has vegetation that takes characters around corners, making possible a place where concealment can happen easily, even as the openness of the space leads out to the infinite horizon enclosing the gigantic mystery of Paris so often dealt with as a setting, a character in itself, in Rivette's feature films.

     The film's utter silence adds a mysterious component, too; no music, no attempt to add an explaining feature.  

     As the main character becomes increasingly upset and desperate after the arrival of a young man she's apparently drawn to, the movie enters its final scene, the woman running from the man down a winding stairway.  They confront each other and embrace, finally, for this is the man she's been waiting for, but there's been trouble between them, reconciled in the film's final frames.

     A small story, yes, but told with verve and creative use of limited space.

     These short films of directors who became great directors are worth watching for they demonstrate the brilliance and talent germinating at an early stage that gave rise to such masterpieces as Rohmer's Claire's Knee and Rivette's Out 1, to name two among many.

     Not as famous as Truffaut or Godard among the New Wave French film directors, Rohmer and Rivette nevertheless are just as important in their ways as they utilized styles unique to their own artistry, ways of making cinema unlike any other cinema.

Vic Neptune