Movie Review : The Human Comedy of Rohmer’s ‘Adventures’

The art of Eric Rohmer is that of inviting us to perceive the universe in a conversation between two people. For more than 25 years, the French writer-director has made films in which people mainly sit around and talk, yet as we listen to their everyday conversations we discover all manner of cosmic implication. This occurs not merely because of what is being said but because we have been beguiled by his people.

Nearing 70, Rohmer seems as never before to be commenting on his own role as a moralist with a passion for language--and finding great good humor in his artist’s presumption. The human comedy, vast category that it is, has always been his subject, and even though he remains as detached as ever, he seems to be acknowledging that he too must surely have his own foibles. His delightful “Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle” (at the Nuart for one week only) suggests that as there are limitations in language, there may be blind spots in the vision of even the most Olympian of moralists.

Typically, he provokes such heavy-duty thoughts in the simplest and slightest of circumstances. In his film’s first “adventure,” Mirabelle (Jessica Forde), an ethnology major at the Sorbonne, is bicycling in the countryside when she has a flat tire near the gate of a lovely old farm, long in the family of Reinette (Joelle Miquel).

These young women are adorable and beautiful in different ways. (Don’t bother looking for unattractive or unfashionable people in a Rohmer film.) The demure Reinette, who has long dark hair, is an aspiring painter who likes to place Degas-like ballet dancers in a Dali-esque dream world. (Later on, she will amusingly deny any such influences, in Rohmer’s wicked send-up of art criticism). She is most eager to share with the patrician, sophisticated Mirabelle l’heure bleu , that “blue hour” just before dawn breaks when the world is completely silent (as long as there’s no truck rumbling by on a nearby highway).

In what is essentially a prologue, Rohmer digresses, risking tedium with Reinette’s love-of-nature sentiments as the two take their time becoming acquainted. The film gets in gear once Mirabelle offers to share her apartment with Reinette, who will soon being going to Paris to study art. The film’s next three “adventures” are vignettes devised to make us aware that virtually everything we do involves a moral choice. Yet there’s nothing of the Sunday-school lesson about them; they are as witty and amusing as they are reflective.

In the second adventure, Reinette encounters what everyone who has ever gone to Paris experiences: the ineluctable, stern rudeness of the true Parisian. It occurs when she sits at an outdoor table at a cafe and orders a coffee with nothing smaller than a 200-franc note to pay for it. Philippe Laudenbach is hilarious as her outraged waiter, yet the incident ends in such a way to allow us to realize how consciously Reinette is concerned with the morality of her every action, something that has never occurred to Mirabelle.

The establishing of this fundamental difference between the two young women leads deftly to the next and most complex sequence, in which they are confronted with a beggar, a shoplifter and a woman (the last played exquisitely by Marie Riviere, the star of the key French-Canadian film “Good Riddance”) whose begging seems to be a con. This is the heart of the film, in which Rohmer seems to be challenging his own assumptions as well as ours and those of his heroines. This “adventure’s” talkiness sets up perfectly the concluding sequence. It’s too inspired and funny to be revealed here, but it involves Reinette’s declaration of her wariness of words, only to be reminded by Mirabelle of her garrulousness and her tendency to continue explaining things to people long after they’ve understood them. (You may wince here in self-recognition).

Except for No. 3, each of the four episodes proceeds as the blithest of sketches, as Rohmer has long learned how to direct with grace and even, when appropriate, with dispatch, despite all the talk. Amazingly, Rohmer has said that he let his young stars improvise; for all its spontaneity, his film has not a self-conscious or awkward moment. Rohmer has said his films belong to the “cinema of thought rather than action” and that he tells stories “which deal less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they’re doing it.” There could be no better description of “Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle” (Times-rated Mature for complex themes).