Space and Intuition: On Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime
Earlier this year, I watched several of Éric Rohmer’s films for the first time — La Collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), Love in the Afternoon (1972), The Green Ray (1986), and then finally his Tales of the Four Seasons series (1990–1998). Rohmer’s film’s are compulsively watchable, despite their slow pace and subtle emotions, and as soon as you finish one, something compels you to dive into the next, to witness the progress of this master filmmaker as he casts his discerning eye on varying human relationships.
It’s hard to pick a favorite Rohmer film, and if anyone were to ask me I would insist they simply watch as many as possible, because that’s the only way to really appreciate and understand his singular style — but if I had to chose one film that I think truly captures Rohmer’s aesthetic vision, I would, perhaps unexpectedly, chose A Tale of Springtime (1990), the first of the Tales of the Four Seasons. I believe this film most effectively articulates Rohmer’s ideas about space and human relationships.
A Tale of Springtime follows Jeanne, a philosophy teacher who is temporarily looking for somewhere to stay. She’s lent her apartment to a friend for a week but can’t bring herself to stay at her boyfriend’s place unless he’s there, partly because of the mess and partly because she doesn’t want to be alone. These are subtle feelings conveyed mostly through the visual staging of the film’s opening scenes: when Jeanne arrives at her boyfriend’s apartment, we can see she’s put off by the rumpled sheets, the clothes on the chairs, the messy piles of books, the claustrophobic lighting. Her own apartment, by contrast, is a more elegant space of bright light, vivid colors, flowers blooming on the balcony, and various art prints on the wall, including Matisse’s La perruche et la sirène, which eventually takes center stage as Jeanne stands before it while taking a phone call, the bright colors of the abstract shapes bringing out her own vibrant outfit, a yellow flower-patterned shirt and stylish blue blazer.
This is, of course, the magic of a Rohmer film, the perfectly calibrated mise en scène of every shot. Jeanne’s apartment is the first of a series of beautiful interiors that make up the rest of the film. Later, after Jeanne meets the young piano student Natacha at a party, we’re introduced to Natacha’s apartment, which has a charming, old-fashioned beauty to it, and then to Natacha’s family’s country house. Jeanne deeply admires these spaces, commenting on the old doors, the paintings, the wallpaper, and noting the unexpected architectural features, including four strange pillars marking off the dining area, whose story Natacha explains in detail. The tour of the country house, meanwhile, concludes with a dazzling shot of Natacha opening a window in a dark room, flooding it suddenly with beautiful sunlight.
This is Rohmer’s commentary on the sacred power of a well-lit and well-decorated space — a beautiful space can make all the difference in how a person reacts to life. The beautiful spaces in Natacha’s life stir something in Jeanne and heighten their friendship. Later, she tries to articulate why she’s unable to stay alone in her boyfriend’s apartment: “When I associate Mathieu with his place, I find him utterly despicable. Isn’t that monstrous?”
“Places mean so much to you,” Natacha replies, simply and perceptively.
The centerpiece of the film, meanwhile, is a dinner between Jeanne, Natacha, Natacha’s father Igor, and his younger girlfriend Ève, a philosophy masters student. There is palpable tension between Ève and Natacha, but the focus of this scene is on the philosophical discussion that ensues between Jeanne and Ève about Kant, transcendental philosophy, and a priori judgements — quite heavy one might say for a film about human relationships, but of course Rohmer makes even a heady, abstract conversation feel weighted and significant. Their dialogue eventually builds to Natacha’s father remembering a line from his own philosophy class: “Space is an a priori form of intuition.” This is not just the culmination of their philosophical dialogue but it is also a declaration of Rohmer’s own philosophy about space and place — a philosophy expressed in the aesthetic language of this very film, evident in every carefully selected and presented room, in all the spaces Jeanne inhabits and admires.
Hearing that line, I thought of other Rohmer films and how the space of the settings played such an essential role: the villa in La Collectionneuse, the apartment in My Night at Maud’s, the lake in Claire’s Knee, the beach in A Tale of Summer. In every Rohmer film, so much of the enchantment comes from his mastery of a pure, authentic sense of place.
Of course, Rohmer is not simply interested in settings abstracted from human emotion. For him, each space is intimately connected to the human feelings at play in his narratives. In A Tale of Springtime, there is the ostensible romantic tension between Jeanne and Natacha’s father, and the film eventually culminates in a lengthy scene between them in a room at the country house, but it is really the friendship between Jeanne and Natacha that occupies the film’s emotional center. They meet on a couch in an apartment where they feel like strangers, they grow close as they wander from room to room or out on the grass against a backdrop of springtime flora, and they quarrel in these same spaces before eventually reconciling in Natacha’s apartment. This final moment is artfully shot, the camera looking in on them from an adjacent room, the door framing their figures as they embrace, reminding us just how much the space around them has influenced their friendship.
Rohmer’s films all have very subtle and complex depictions of human relationships, and it was only recently that I realized they reminded me of the novels of one of my favorite writers, British novelist Anthony Powell, whose twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time is possibly my favorite book series ever written, certainly the one I reread most frequently. Like Rohmer, Powell understands human emotions on a profoundly subtle level, and he dramatizes them with such a deft and insightful touch. “Human relationships flourish and decay,” he writes in Book One, A Buyer’s Market, “quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.” Later, in Book Three, he compares life to a game of Russian billiards: “…on those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time — a quarter of an hour, I think — the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the lot to be replayed; and all the scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarily aware that any change has taken place, are careening uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.”
Powell’s novels, set as they are in the impending shadow of World War II, are ultimately bleaker and more melancholy than Rohmer’s films, most of which by contrast often end on a note of moral fulfillment. But there is something in the rhythm’s of Powell’s prose that reminds me of the pace and style of Rohmer’s films — the classical, polished syntax mirroring Rohmer’s deliberate and careful production design and the complex rhythms evoking the subtle emotions of Rohmer’s characters and stories. In A Tale of Springtime, Jeanne’s epiphany in the film’s final moments is not too unlike what Powell describes above: as Natacha tries on her mother’s necklace, Jeanne begins unexpectedly to cry, a release of all the pent up emotion that has been building little by little. Why does she cry, she who for an hour and forty minutes has been so poised and put together? Perhaps, as Powell said above, for Jeanne “events [have begun] suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected,” and she understands now that she has experienced something profound, something not easily put into words.
The film concludes with Jeanne reasserting control over her own spaces — first the apartment which her friend has finally vacated, the Matisse print hanging significantly in the background, and then her boyfriend’s place, where she brings fresh flowers before beginning to clean things up. The emotional resolution has a tidiness that I have come to expect from a Rohmer film, where characters often reach such stages of moral clarity — Adrien in La Collectionneuse calling his girlfriend, for example, or Gaspard in A Tale of Summer packing his things and getting on the boat. But after the film is over, it is not usually the endings that linger in my mind, profound and complex as their emotions may be. Instead, I find myself thinking of the spaces within the film, the powerful and evocative settings. With A Tale of Springtime, I think of Jeanne and Natacha walking on the grass, or standing together in a well-lit interior, framed by paintings and elegant wallpaper, or entering a dark room and then opening the shutters and filling it with light.
