Eric Rohmer’s RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS

I wrote the following review of Eric Rohmer’s Rendezvous in Paris for this week’s COVID-19/all-streaming Cine-file Chicago list.

Eric Rohmer’s RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS (French)
Available to stream free at https://www.tubitv.com 

Who knows what possessed Eric Rohmer, at the ripe old age of 74, to interrupt the making of his “Tales of the Four Seasons,” the third and final of his major film cycles (following “Six Moral Tales” and “Comedies and Proverbs”), in order to knock off this quickie rom-com anthology in 1995? Surely he must have realized that, at his advanced age, each new movie could very well be his last, while also knowing that he had two more features (A SUMMER’S TALE and AN AUTUMN TALE) to shoot. Whatever the reason, we should all thank the cinema gods that he did decide to write and direct this small, unexpected masterpiece consisting of three separate vignettes about meetings — some by chance, others planned — between young men and women in the titular city: RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS captures the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague more closely than what any of this director’s contemporaries achieved from the 1980s onwards (the only real competition being Jacques Rivette’s UP DOWN FRAGILE from the same year). In fact, the continuity between Rohmer’s first feature, THE SIGN OF LEO, made in 1959, and this — in terms of character, setting, theme and even visual style — is remarkable; Rohmer captures here the vagaries of the human heart by photographing, in handheld, freewheeling 16mm, the relationship dynamics between an amusing gallery of college students, teachers, artists and other assorted bohemians, with a winning fleetness that suggests a much younger filmmaker. The first story, “The 7 O’clock Rendezvous,” follows a student (Clara Bellar) who improvises a plan to exact revenge on the boyfriend she suspects of cheating on her. Packed with enough characters and intricate plot twists to sustain a whole feature, it is the most conventionally entertaining of the three. The second story, “The Benches of Paris,” depicts a series of meetings in public parks between a young woman in a committed relationship (the superb Aurore Rauscher) and another man, a would-be suitor, with whom she refuses to meet in private. The narrative seems almost meandering until Rohmer arrives at a surprising, and exceedingly clever, punchline of an ending. The third story, “Mother and Child, 1907,” is the best of the lot: it offers a hilarious, satirical portrait of a pretentious/mansplaining painter (Michael Kraft) who stalks a potential female conquest inside and outside of an art gallery near his home studio. Tying all of these stories together are performances by a male/female street-musician duo (both play accordion and sing), who function as a kind of Greek chorus and threaten to turn the whole enterprise into a parody of stereotypical notions of “Gallic charm.” Perhaps this last element is why some critics have dismissed RENDEZVOUS IN PARIS as nothing more than lightweight fluff but there’s a reason why no less a luminary than Rivette considered it to be not just his favorite Rohmer movie but a “summit of French cinema.” (1995, 98 min) MGS