La femme de l'aviateur

THE AVIATOR'S WIFE - Eric Rohmer / France 1981 (3.5 STARS) 15 December 2003: It is always difficult to get overtly excited about an Eric Rohmer film or make any relative comparisons with conviction - Eric Rohmer's works are almost like Jazz music, delicate in their appeal and full of irony, yet not given to the charts. The Aviator's Wife, the 1st in Rohmer's series of Comedies & Proverbs is subtle like poetry by full of the irony of urban existence. Set in his hometown Paris (as most of his films are), this is a film about a young woman's insecurity about growing old lonely, and a young man's obsession with the slightly older woman. Artfully made with a color palette that seems to reflect the hues of the lives of the characters, the film is talkative yet reflective and insecure with a certain confidence. . Mise-en-scene: The character's motivations are developed with painstaking detail in an attempt to build characters that we may grow to either love or loath, but irrespective respect as real people. I was drawn to the young man's character in particular and to his singularly obsessive personality even though he was gentle and carefree at first sight.

. The older woman was so typically stereo cast as idiosyncratic, intense and detached in a manner only the French can be. In the final scene one feel for the boy when he discovers that the young girl he meets on the bus has been feeding him all along, but before we have time to react, Rohmer makes a comic joke of the situation by spinning the movie into a loop so that we end up almost where we started, except that we've got a different man that the protagonist is trailing this time around. . The Cinematography, is bland, almost dogma like (way before the birth of Dogma- this is 1981), and there is almost no emphasis at technique beyond functionality. Yet sound is used to haunting effect, with ambient sound playing a potent character. Whether this was because of poor on location sound or whether this has been used as a stylistic element to enhance the narrative is however difficult to tell.

In this bittersweet tale of disconnections and possibilities perhaps we have the essence of the art of Eric Rohmer. If you have only one Rohmer film to see, perhaps you ought to make it this one because it is so very, very French, so interestingly talkative (one of Rohmer's trademarks) and so very, very Rohmer.

The Aviator's wife, incidentally does not appear except in a photograph, but that is all to the point. Everything is a bit off stage in this intriguing drama: love especially is a bit off stage. And yet how all the participants yearn.

Marie Riviere stars as Anne who is in love with the aviator. We catch her just as she learns that he no longer wants her. He tells her that his wife is pregnant and so he must return to her. Meanwhile, she is being pestered by Francois (Philippe Marlaud) who is in love with her. However he is a little too young and "clinging." Truly she is not interested. It is a disconnection as far as she is concerned.

The heart of the film occurs when Francois is following the aviator and the blond woman. Francois is obsessive and jealous. He follows because...it isn't clear and he really doesn't know why except that this is the man that Anne loves. As it happens while he is following them he runs into a pretty fifteen-year-old (Lucie, played fetchingly by Anne-Laure Meury) who imagines that he is following her. She turns it into a game, and again we have a disconnection. She is fun and cute and full of life, but he cannot really see her because he pines for Anne. Meanwhile Anne of course is pining for the aviator.

Rohmer's intriguing little joke is about the aviator's wife. Who is she and what is she like? We can only imagine. And this is right. The woman imagines what the other woman is like, but never really knows unless she meets her.

Maire Riviere is only passably pretty, but she has gorgeous limbs and beautiful skin and a hypnotic way about her, which Rohmer accentuates in the next to the last scene in her apartment with Francois. We follow the talk between the two, of disconnection and off center possibilities, of friends and lovers with whom things are tantalizingly not exactly right and yet not tragically wrong. As we follow this talk we see that Anne's heart is breaking or has broken--and all the while we see her skin as Francois does. She wants to be touched, but not by him. And then she allows him to touch her, but only in comforting gestures, redirecting his hands away from amorous intent. And then she goes out with a man in whom she really has no interest.

Such is life, one might say. Rohmer certainly thinks so.

One thing I love about Rohmer's films is that you cannot predict where they will go. Another thing is his incredible attention to authentic detail about how people talk and how they feel without cliché and without any compromise with reality--Rohmer's reality of course, which I find is very much like the reality that I have experienced.

See this for Eric Rohmer whose entre into the world of cinema is substantial, original, and wonderfully evocative of what it is like to live in the modern world with an emphasis on personal relationships and love.

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A gem. I don't usually like Rohmer's films, but this one is wonderful, even though some may feel the plot is extremely slight. But the texture, the wonderful actors, the capture of the small details of life made this an unforgettable movie.

Now I can safely deem I have reached an approximate age to watch Rohmer's canon, mid-30s is a ripe age to broach more cerebral film viewing activities, so my first and random pick is THE AVIATOR'S WIFE, Rohmer's first part of Comedies et Proverbes (6 parts in all) series.

The film is capsulized in one-day's span, Francois (Marlaud), a young student whose night shift makes the relationship with his girlfriend Anne (Rivière) in strain, after witnessing Anne left with her ex-lover Christian (Carrière) from her apartment in the morning, and later a sour altercation with Anne, a jealousy-driven Francois compulsively follows Christian and his blonde companion (Caillot), and by happenstance he meets a 15-year-old schoolgirl Lucie (Meury), the two improvise an amateurish but perky private detective team until they find out Christian goes to visit a lawyer. After Lucie departs, Francois visits a stress-inflicted Anne, it seems they reconcile and Francois figures out who the blonde is. When the night falls, Anne is out for an exhausting date and Francois accidentally finds Lucie kiss another boy, so he sends a postcard to her and put a closure to their stalking adventure, the story ends.

There is no big twist or melodramatic plots in Rohmer's film, he masterfully recounts the dribs and drabs of emotions pestering one's relationship and daily lives, visceral and empathetic, he unerringly captures the quirks and fluctuations of the characters he writes, no larger-than-life frills, everything returns to an authentic basis which reflects its transfixing mojo, for example, the intricate discovery of the blonde's identity is casually schemed, but never condescending or audience-pandering, truth reveals itself in its most trivial form, also in the park, when Lucie intends to take a Polaroid from two tourists, it is lifelikeness never feel redundant in spite of its overlong progress which would be trimmed in most cinematic presentations, but Rohmer is confident to let his audience to savor the subtle interactions among the players and keeps it vibrant.

The sad trivia of the cast is Marlaud would soon die in a tragic camping tent fire accident after completing this film, he was only 22, in the film he interprets a sensitive and diffident boy, who is smitten with Anne, an independent working girl 5 years older than him, their on-and-off rapport is under close scrutiny, and Rivière takes on a more difficult role and dominates the screen especially during her expository declaration of her credo in self-reliance in her tiny apartment. Meury is a delight in the midstream, maybe too quick-witted for a 15-year-old, but her natural self-confidence could easily win audiences over.

The titular wife only exists as a glimpse on a picture, whose back-story would illicit another film feature to expound an existential individual's philosophical quandary about affection and compromise. Sadly, there is no Rohmer in this world anymore.

I could call this one of my favorite Rohmers, but there isn't one about which I wouldn't say that. Somewhere I've read that Rohmer's male characters are less perfectly, or maybe it's less caringly, drawn than his female. Yet I don't think there's one whose mistakes, harms, self-deceptions I haven't either fallen into or sidestepped one time or another. "Aviator's Wife" flows to and then from a single easy-to-miss but magically telling moment, worked by sprite of the park, Lucie, in the post-park café across from the building into which the aviator has temporarily disappeared. François nods off for a second or two. With a touch on the cheek, Lucie wakes him, immediately, and tells him it's been ten minutes. Circumstance and moment trap him into believing, believing spontaneously like a babe, even though he hasn't believed a word from his Anne all day. Up until the final reel, Rohmer seems to be working to make us dislike Anne, even as our embarrassment for François brings us close to hatred for him. Anne's tired from the start, weary and wary of men who think they're in love. I was shocked that she's only 25, just as I was that wise Lucie is only 15 (and that François is as many years as he is past, say, 12). Even understanding the self-interest and harmfulness of François' self-deception, it's hard not to wince at Anne's defenses, however wise and justified they are. Better to savor the funnily wise Lucie. For twenty-plus years until this recent viewing, I remembered Lucie but could only picture Anne. Anne in my memory: dark unruly hair, bony, going to or leaving a lonely single bed, like a convalescent. I remembered her as having a cold, yet she doesn't.

The film's proverb is "It's impossible to think about nothing." Long ago in a language class, a language I never carried through with and retain very little of, when the gruff prof challenged me, "Stop hesitating!" I got up the nerve and the unlikely spontaneity to complain understandably in the language, "I stop to think when I speak English. This is normal for me. Why can't I hesitate in ________?" "When you speak ________," he shot back without missing a beat, "don't think!" François and, perhaps more justifiably, Anne dig their respective holes because neither of them can manage not to think, neither can successfully think "rien."

But Rohmer's never so simple, so expository. That moment in the café, caught unthinking, François is deceived. Trivially, but deceived all the same. Does that instant overturn the proverb? Don't know.