If only poor old (really old) Eric Rohmer hadn’t called his set of six films “moral tales.” Made “out of order” between 1963 and 1972 and based on stories that Rohmer wrote some 10 or more years earlier, some of the Moral Tales are feature length and some of them shorts, some of them in color and some — necessarily  — black and white, but there is a consistency to the set, as each film deals, according to the director, with a man who, though destined for one woman, is temporarily sidetrack, for the length of the movie, by another. 

Call them Six Romantic Tales, or Six Paradoxical Tales, or just plain Six Tales. Had Rohmer done so, he would have staved off decades of critical machinations over the “morality” of the films, and spared himself a lot of  tsuris having to explain and re-explain himself.  When he came to his next collectively named sets, he did just that, calling one of them “Tales of the Four Seasons” and the other “Comedies et Proverbs” — all vague enough to allow the director some liturgical leeway and stolid enough to give a sense of finality to the critical compass.

 

You can see what he got himself into on the new, fabulous Criterion set of the Six Moral Tales. On the disc for  The Bakery Girl of Monceau in the set, Criterion includes “Moral Tales, Filmic Issues,” an 80 minute conversation or interview between Rohmer and the films’ producer, Barbet Schroeder, who is of course an internationally known director in his own right. When they get to the title, once again Rohmer ties himself in verbal knots trying to explain it. The confusion may be the difference between the languages. French speakers might well know exactly what is meant by “moral tales,” but English speakers bring different connotations to the phrase. But on the disc for  La Collectionneuse Rohmer is interrogated for an hour by two French Canadian TV critics about his life and career and yet again, the intricacies of the title demand explanation. It didn’t help that the most famous of the batch, My Night at Maud’s, featured lengthy digressions on the meaning of Pascal and had a guy wrestle with casually sleeping with a gay divorcee.

 

If My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee are the most well known of the Rohmer tales, the early shorts that form the first two parts of the series are the least well know, by anybody, and it is a joy to have them so readily available, with all the others. In fact it is interesting to ponder these two shorts has bearing in miniature the concerns of the later, more complex films. It becomes clear that Rohmer does not necessarily sympathize with or admire his male protagonists, and that one of the key hurdles the viewer has to get past is the disparity between what characters say about themselves, even in voice over, and what the movie reveals about them. The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the first and the shortest of the films, and concerns a man (Barbet Schroeder) who juggles a girl named Sylvie (Michele Giardon) and a baker’s assistant, Jacqueline (Claudine Soubrier), later cruelly dumping the lower class girl. The film sets the tone — yes, the moral tone — for the films to follow. The 23-minute Bakery Girl was completed in 1963 and so was the hour long Suzanne’s Career, which tells of Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen), the less romantically successful friend of rake Guillaume (Christian Charriere), and who almost dates Guillaum’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne (Catherine See), but indecision prevails.

 

 

As in a Neil LaBute film, both men are horrible, the weakling and the strong one. Thus we are prepped for fully understanding the character of Adrien (Patrick Bachau), the preening art dealer in the fourth film of the series, and another lesser known one,  La Collectionneuse, who takes a vacation from his girlfriend to stay with an artist pal Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) borrowing a villa in southern Mediterranean France. Also staying in the house is  Haydee (Haydee Politoff), a carefree girl who has a more solid moral center than either of the two men, as shown by the cruel way that Adrien tempts, taunts, and uses her. Seeing it in the context of all the later films, plus the first two shorts, its meaning is clear and the story is rather hard to take, but only because it is so uncompromising.

My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and Love in the Afternoon are too well know to benefit from my regurgitations here. Suffice it to say that it was a pleasure to reacquaint myself with them.

 

The Bakery Girl of Monceau comes in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles. As with all the films in the set, this is windowboxed. Also on the disc is Rohmer’s 10 minute film  Presentation, or Charlotte and her Steak, starring  Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, and “Moral Tales, Filmic Issues.”  Suzanne’s Career is a full frame presentation (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s short film  Nadja in Paris.  My Night at Maud’s is in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 and optional English subtitles. Supplements include On Pascal, a film Rohmer made of a conversation between authors and philosophers Brice Parain and Dominique Dubarle (22 minutes), and an episode of  Telecinema, which interviews critic Jean Douchet, star Trintignant, and producer Pierre Cottrel (14 minutes), plus the theatrical trailer. The full frame (1.33:1 OAR) transfer of  La Collectionneuse is gorgeous, and it has French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus the short documentary Rohmer directed called  A Modern Coed  (13 minutes), which anticipates his later Tales of the Four Seasons, an episode of  Parlons Cinema, a 1977 interview with Rohmer, and the theatrical trailer. Claire’s Knee comes in full frame (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 track and optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s 1999 short film  The Curve, and an excerpt from the French television program  Le journal du cinema, with interviews with stars Jean-Claude Brialy, Beatrice Romand, and Laurence de Monahagan. Finally,  Love in the Afternoon is once again in a full frame transfer (1.33:1 OAR) with French DD 1.0 audio with optional English subtitles, plus Rohmer’s 1958 short  Veronique and her Dunce, and the theatrical trailer.  Finally, there is an “Afterword by Neil LaBute” (12 minutes), and it becomes clear that Mamet is less of an influence on LaBute in his own cruel portraits of soulless moderns than Rohmer is (though Polanski might be another one).

All the discs come in digipaks and are accompanied by the a book of the short stories on which the films are based, and a 60 page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles,  transfer info, still, and essays by and about Rohmer, including Molly Haskell and  Film Comment elites such as Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.

 

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales hit the street on August 15th, and retails for $99.95. The whole box is No. 342, with the individual films bearing numbers 343 through 348. It is to be hoped that the release of these older films will create an appetite for more recent Rohmer, the last five or six of his films having found no purchase on the American market.

 

Comments: None