By Stuart Mitchner

But it was quite difficult for me to be mean with Philippe Marlaud, who plays François, because he was a particularly sweet and kind young man…. He never got to see the finished film.

—Marie Rivière

“Have we seen Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife?” my wife wants to know. “I don’t think so,” I say, not particularly interested until she says “Marie Rivière’s in it,” knowing how I feel about Marie Rivière. In the closing moment of Le rayon vert (1986), released as Summer in the U.S., when Rivière’s benighted Delphine sees the line of green flash on the horizon and knows that after suffering confusion and heartache she’s finally at one with her feelings and the world, so am I. It sounds hopelessly banal: a Parisian stenographer who can’t seem to fit in, looking for love on her summer vacation only to be disappointed and discomfited at every turn. After Éric Rohmer’s previous film, Full Moon in Paris (1984). I was in danger of associating his work with the tedium of watching photogenic young things frolic in and out of pointless affairs. Not so in Summer, thanks to Rohmer’s wiser self, and, most of all, thanks to Rivière’s unforgettable performance, most if not all of which was improvised (she shares screenplay credit).

The Blue Hour

While Rohmer was waiting to shoot Delphine’s special moment, he began filming Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987), a transition that can be explained by the title of the first adventure, “The Blue Hour,” a short period of night just before sunrise when “the day birds aren’t up yet and the night birds are already asleep.” The country girl Reinette (Joëlle Miquel), a talented painter, wants to share the purity of that moment with her Parisian friend Mirabelle (Jessica Forde), an ethnology student. When the perfect silence is spoiled by the sound of a passing car, Reinette is reduced to tears, which is what happens more than once to Delphine during her emotional quest to see the green ray.

An Unlikely Protagonist

Five years before she played Delphine, Rivière’s first major role was as Anne in The Aviator’s Wife (1981). although she appears only at the beginning and the end. A minute into her first scene, where the man she loves (the aviator) tells her it’s all over, that he’s marrying someone else who’s carrying his child, Anne handles the news well enough, but, like Delphine before her, she’s out of synch with the world; when her 20-year-old boyfriend (she’s 25) keeps calling her office, she’s too rattled to talk to him and tells her assistant to make excuses and finally “Just hang up.”

The boyfriend is François (played by the late Philippe Marlaud), a sleep-deprived law student with a night job sorting mail at the post office. On his way to give Anne a piece of trivial information (the phone number of a plumber), he sees Anne and the aviator emerging from her building, jealously assumes the worst, and eventually finds himself trailing the man and a mysterious blonde all over Paris. The film comes to life when he’s joined in his stalking mission by Lucie, a bewitching 15-year-old played by Anne-Laure Meury, who steals the film as soon as she decides she and François are going to play detective. Even so, our sympathies are with Rohmer’s unlikely male protagonist, who has a way of falling asleep in cafes, on busses, and park benches. For one thing, Marlaud has boyish good looks in contrast to the usual well-turned-out Rohmer males like the tall, suave aviator.

Rivière is at her conflictedly emotional best in the film’s penultimate scene, confessing her woes to Marlaud’s gently caring François. Asked in a Metrograph interview about the “cathartic” 20-minute scene, she said, “Although Éric liked his actors to move naturally, we had to block that scene very precisely before the shoot since the room was especially small. Éric asked me to express myself through gestures so that the audience wouldn’t be too bored when I spoke in bed. That allowed me to unleash emotions, and I might have made more gestures than necessary because I tried to breathe life into the rather demanding dialogue. Éric also wanted to make sure I could cry on demand since this was my first big role. So he made me rehearse a lot, and he was relieved to see that I cried at the same exact moment every time.”

“Chaplinesque”

As it happened, my wife and I watched The Aviator’s Wife on Friday, June 26, the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. For Chaplin, whose cinematic vision has certain climactic sunrise and sunset qualities in common with Rohmer’s, the operative term is “Chaplinesque,” which is usually boringly defined as reminiscent of the “English comic actor and director of the silent fim era.” My response to Rohmer’s engaging take on the Parisian human comedy and the Philippe Marlaud character’s pathetic, ultimately unproductive quest has been haunted by Chaplin’s spirit, particularly as expressed in Hart Crane’s poem “Chaplinesque,” where a kitten becomes, in his words, the “symbol” of Chaplin’s “social sympathies.” The second stanza begins: “For we can still love the world, who find / A famished kitten on the step, and know / Recesses for it from the fury of the street.” The poem ends with the poet hearing “through all sound of gaiety and quest…a kitten in the wilderness.”

The Heart of Paris

Rohmer’s Paris would seem to be a long way from kittens in the wilderness and the fury of the street and yet Eric Rohmer’s song “Paris m’a seduit,” which plays over the final sequence and closing credits of The Aviator’s Wife (1981), refers to “the hardships of life … in the city so vast and wide constantly buffeted by wind and tide … a struggle for survival renewed each day with cruel destiny refusing to point the way” and “the dark and malevolent night” that “drives all ease from anguished sight.” The song and the film end as “muffled roars still prowl the street, for the heart of Paris never ceases to beat.”

Arielle Dombasle’s singing of “Paris m’a seduit” begins as François goes through the last pathetic motions of posting a card to Lucie revealing that the blonde woman with the aviator was neither his lover nor wife but his sister. In effect, the film’s title is a red herring (call it a shaggy aviator story), the sort that Raymond Chandler himself might have used. No longer a poor man’s private eye, François becomes another passer-by waiting in line to buy a stamp for the card, looking for a place to post it, and then disappearing into the crowd.

Art and Life

It’s hard to keep life and death from intruding on art when you know that Philippe Marlaud died in a fire two months later. As Marie Rivière says in her Metrograph interview, “his tent burned down because he forgot to blow out a candle before going to sleep, and he never got to see the finished film.”

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Note: I caught the Raymond Chandler connection only after noticing the way the actor’s name Philippe Marlaud exactly echoes that of Chandler’s famous private eye Philip Marlowe. Finally, I want to mention the Films in Print version of Rohmer’s breakthrough film My Night at Maud’s (Rutgers Press 1993) and C.G. Crisp’s Eric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist (Indiana University Press 1