MOVIE REVIEW : Romance a la Eric Rohmer in ‘Boyfriends’

To be content with the doings of the bright, earnest and infinitely self-involved young lovers whom Eric Rohmer so obviously loves in his “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” (Westside Pavilion), you must adjust yourself to an exquisitely calibrated surface with not a great deal beneath. It’s like the world’s most civilized reflecting pool, and Rohmer’s trick is that he never breaks the surface tension, never once allows his characters to get in over their depth.

At times, Blanche (sensitive newcomer Emmanuelle Chaulet) shows signs of an un-Rohmer-like agitation. She bursts into tears of fury at herself when a paralyzing shyness keeps her from making a move about a man who attracts her, the tall, self-assured Alexandre (Francois-Eric Gendron). Sometimes, in the eerie, echoing satellite city outside Paris where she lives and works, the sound of her own footsteps in her sterile apartment sets up a lonely resonance that makes her cry again.

This real city is Cergy-Pontoise, the vision of Argentine architect Ricardo Bofill. It may remind you of the city in “Logan’s Run,” where no one was allowed to grow old. Or perhaps of the glass-enclosed city of the Oz books. It is an overwhelming presence, an environment manicured down to the last man-made wind-surfing lake. Watching families picnicking on its perfect rolling lawns, you want to check for Astroturf burn. Something about all this thought-through, clean perfection makes you absolutely ache for the nihilism of Jackson Pollock.

(Of course, Rohmer may do that to you too. I remember a friend’s furious summation of one of the great successes from his earlier “Moral Tales” cycle: “A 40-minute debate about an action, then the action itself--which takes 30 seconds--followed by 45 minutes of debate about what just took place. All extremely French.” Rohmer is not for all tastes. For those who collect him, this is less scintillating than “Pauline at the Beach”--and it has no character as magnetic as Arielle Dombasle nor as marvelously self-deluding--but it has a bracing sort of charm that grows on you.)

Cergy-Pontoise is, of course, exactly Rohmer’s point: He delights in watching real feelings play themselves out against this perfectly controlled artificiality. That our four lovers at cross-purposes will get things straightened out is never in doubt. The fun comes in watching self-interest collide with the tenets of honor and friendship--as well as the sneaky rush of feelings that surface upon seeing a discarded lover on the arm of a close friend.

Blanche and Lea are the friends. Blanche works in the Ministry of Culture; Lea (Sophie Renoir), her visual opposite, olive-skinned and coltishly skittish, is a data-processing trainee. One swims, the other doesn’t, but Blanche offers to teach Lea. In the friendship that evolves, Lea confides that she and her lover Fabien (Eric Viellard) have less and less in common, but that she wants to end it “in easy stages.”

We can see the natural selection of the sweet, athletic Fabien and Blanche, long before she can, since she’s busy mooning over that clot Alexandre. And Alexandre, “the perfect bureaucrat,” is so romantically wrapped up in himself that it’s a wonder there’s any room for Lea at all. However, she is a brilliant match for his boring brand of small talk, so the die is cast.

And Cergy-Pontoise looms overall, the perfect village, which Alexandre and Lea keep leaving in favor of the more cosmopolitan Paris, and which Blanche and Fabien feel right at home in. (Although, to his credit, Fabien prefers its more rustic river banks to its manicured parks.)

Of the four, it is Chaulet’s Blanche who is the heart of the piece. Watching her wind her hair, reassure herself with little pats and touches, it’s easy to think that, she is a desperately unsure actress. But she has gone on to play the completely confident, in-control young wife and mother in Claire Denis’ colonial saga “Chocolat” (at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), and from that you can gauge just how fine, how perceptive and how deliberate a performance this is.

The other three are perfectly chosen, and there is a quick moment by the beautiful Rohmer veteran, Anne-Laure Meury (“The Aviator’s Wife,” “Perceval”), who arrives on the scene with an insight about Alexandre and makes you wish she would never leave.

Go with the expectation of a solid tennis match, thwack, thwack, thwack, every ball perfectly returned in vividly beautiful surroundings, and you’ll be pleasantly satisfied. The wit is not verbal, but visual, cerebral and cumulative. The joke comes when you realize that everyone is working away, each in his or her own distinctive style, to reach exactly the same conclusion.