Some years ago a critic from another city and I were discussing foreign filmmakers and we found there was only one about whom we strongly disagreed - the French director Eric Rohmer.
"His movies are about as interesting as watching paint dry," the other critic said. I argued that Rohmer is misunderstood, that while it's true his films tend to be talky - and therefore more taxing than the average subtitled foreign-language movie - they are also more satisfying than the average movie.Rohmer is a subtle, sly filmmaker concerned about the human condition, and his movies tend to explore the lives of everyday people and how they react to incidents that compromise their - and our - perceptions of right and wrong. As such they are deceptively simple.
His latest, "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle," is perhaps his most overt cinematic probing of human ethics, but what makes it so appealing is that Rohmer offers no easy answers. He lets us decide for ourselves whether the choices of his protagonists are right or wrong.
Rohmer's other films, including those in his "comedies and proverbs" series ("Pauline at the Beach," "Boyfriends and Girlfriends"), have all been told in straight narrative story form, but "Reinette and Mirabelle" is composed of four short stories about two women with radically different views of the world and how they personally react to situations that arise in their lives.
The first story is rather ethereal, the third is a fairly serious exploration of the film's overall theme and the second and fourth are more comic in nature - and very funny, in Rohmer's patented low-key style.
The first of the four is "The Blue Hour," which is essentially the story of how Reinette (Joelle Miquel) and Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) meet. Reinette is an aspiring artist who has finished high school by correspondence. She lives and paints in a barn and meets Mirabelle, an ethnology student, on the nearby dirt road when her bike gets a flat.
Rohmer immediately turns audience expectations sideways, revealing that Reinette, though the more conservative of the two in appearance (always wearing a feminine frock), paints abstract female nudes and receives her greatest joy from what she calls "the blue hour," actually a minute or so of complete silence just before daybreak as night creatures bed down and day creatures are about to awake.
Mirabelle, meanwhile, though more casually dressed in jeans and first observed riding her bike down the lonely country road, has no idea how to fix her flat bicycle tire and reveals that she is a city girl.
Rohmer is immediately telling us to set our expectations aside - he's not going to trod the usual movie paths.
The next three stories all deal specifically with ethical questions the two young women confront as they share an apartment in Paris, Mirabelle continuing her studies and Reinette painting.
The second story, "The Waiter," has Reinette confronted by a comically rude waiter who won't give her change for a large bill to pay for a cup of coffee. He tells her not to leave until she has the right change. Mirabelle tells her to forget about it, the guy deserves to be stiffed. But Reinette has pangs of guilt after they leave.
Next is "The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac, the Hustler," as Reinette and Mirabelle confront the three title characters. They disagree about the first two and then Reinette stands up to the latter.
Finally, there is "Selling the Painting," the funniest of the four, with Reinette finally getting a gallery owner to look at her work but making an unfortunate bet with Mirabelle at the same time. It seems talkative Reinette is determined to show Mirabelle she can shut up when she has to, so she agrees to go the entire next day without speaking a word. Naturally, that is the day the gallery owner wants to see her work. How she sells her painting to him without talking makes for some funny stuff, as Rohmer appears to be satirizing his own reputation for making talky movies.
In the end, audiences either take to Rohmer's work or they don't. For me, he is a delightful observer of human nature, and "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle" is a very enjoyable collection of those observations.
The film is not rated but is clearly in PG territory, with some mild profanities and some nudity depicted in Reinette's abstract paintings.