Screening: Friday 17 November, 13.45 and 18.15, NFT2
Tireless in his invention of haplessly overarticulate characters who prefer dissecting neuroses to resolving problems, Eric Rohmer has made himself a quirky cottage industry within the already artisanal economic space now available to independent auteurs. In his latest airy portrait of the flighty chatterers of the French capital, Les Rendez-Vous de Paris, Rohmer carries his camera around to make a sort of up-to-the-minute travelogue of the trendy areas of the city. The Marais, Belleville, the south slope of Montmartre, Beaubourg, La Villette--all pass in review before the second-to-last scene brings us back to ground zero of Rohmerland, the cafes of Montparnasse.
The film consists of three separate short subjects that show chance encounters destroying promising relationships. The first, Le Rendez-Vous de 7 Heures (The 7 O'Clock Appointment), has Esther (Clara Bellar) suspect that boyfriend Horace (Antoine Basler) is playing the field. When her lost wallet is returned by a pretty stranger (Cecile Pares), Esther accompanies her to her 7 o'clock assignation and finds her worst fears confirmed. In Les Bancs de Paris (Paris Park Benches), a beautiful girl about to leave a loveless live-in relationship spends a chaste romantic winter visiting city parks with her new flame (Serge Renko), a sensitive if conventional provincial professor. When they finally decide to spend a weekend together in a hotel, she discovers that her spurned boyfriend is cheating as well, and her appetites desert her. And in Mere et Enfant 1907 (Mother and Child 1907), a painter (Michal Kraft) escorting a charming Swedish girl (Veronika Johansson) to the Picasso Museum ditches her when he falls in love at first sight with a nameless young beauty (Benedicte Loyen). Unfortunately for him, she is a newlywed with less than a hour left to her stay in Paris.
As is to be expected of a Rohmer script, the torrent of self-examination washing over the characters at all times seldom incites them to action. Newcomer Rauscher, a math student in real life, carries the central sequence as the maddeningly unattainable woman of the park benches, and Kraft's self-centered painter ends the film with an understated comic touch. Sure to please Rohmer's loyal following, Les Rendez-Vous de Paris treads lightly on its shoestring budget and gives Francophiles everywhere a charming look at Paris and its talkative flakes.
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