Eric Rohmer’s films have successively investigated the concept of love, up until the point where nothing much was left of it, safe for a sickly, pestering memory that comes alongside a ton of prattle. That is something that we all know. But, what we do tend to gloss over is that, while we’re tied up within the assiduous contemplations of his characters, Rohmer’s uncomplicated and polished mechanism – which he had perfected in time, featuring people that would unspool their sentimental weavings in against a backdrop that was always carefully chosen – facilitates the spectator’s meeting with a series of recognizable places, but to which they have never been to. Rohmer’s films allow these spaces to breathe once they come into contact with a sum of characters that wander across them, much like tourists – meaning, actors on a set. I think that his cinema has never tried to detach itself from this vaguely artificial, vaguely documentary dimension, in spite of the pointed naturalism of the performances, in which film is quite simply a testament about the actors that took part in its construction.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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