The screenplay drew inspiration from both music and philosophy. Rohmer, whose brother René Schérer was a philosopher, was strongly influenced during his student years by La pensée d’Alain (Alain is the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier). This rational humanism emphasises freedom, individual responsibility and resistance to despotism. His famous motto, “Penser, c’est dire non”, aptly sums up this critical stance towards prejudice and intellectual laziness. In the late 1980s, Rohmer also re-read the work of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. This led to an erudite essay, Le Mozart et Beethoven, in which Rohmer analyses the views of various great philosophers on the art of music.
Rohmer portrays his heroine Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) as a Kantian disciple: a philosophy teacher who, faced with a textbook case – the story of a stolen necklace in which a young girl accuses her stepmother – comes to understand the limits of knowledge and the relativity of truth. These “Limits of Knowledge” refer to Kant’s idea that the human mind cannot fathom everything. The girl in question, Natacha, is a pianist, just like Florence Darel, the actress who plays her. The film is therefore graced with compositions by Robert Schumann and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Jeanne, who never really feels at home anywhere, is perhaps the Rohmer heroine who moves house most often. We see her constantly gathering her belongings – clothes and meagre possessions – to move from one place to another: the cluttered flat she shares with her temporarily absent and slovenly lover; her own small flat in Paris, which she has lent to a niece; the luxurious flat of Natacha, a young music student whom she meets at a party and with whom she soon becomes friends and shares intimate details; and the country house belonging to Natacha and her father Igor (Hugues Quester). The latter has a girlfriend, Eve (Eloïse Bennett), who is no older than his daughter and is detested by her. Jeanne gradually gets the feeling that her new friend has deliberately drawn her in to take Eve’s place in her father’s life.
Around this apparent plot, Rohmer weaves a modern marivaudage, in which the trivial and the fairy-tale-like – such as the symbolic significance of the stolen or lost necklace, a minor plot within the larger whole – are delicately interwoven. As usual, the characters chatter away merrily and try to articulate their feelings as clearly as possible, which simultaneously brings them to a certain degree of self-knowledge.
Rohmer’s ironic tone counterbalances the sometimes irritating chatter and philosophising of his affected ‘bon chic, bon genre’ quartet – men in blue jumpers loosely draped over their shoulders, women in horizontally striped T-shirts – with a light-hearted approach that is also visually reflected in the pastel colours of the interiors. The playful chats are sometimes a bit pedantic, but Rohmer himself pokes fun at that too, for example in the long scene where Natacha, Eve and Igor discuss Kant’s synthetic judgements and the phenomenology of the Austro-German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Conte de printemps is certainly no heavy intellectual exercise. Rather, Rohmer turns it into a playful, slightly mocking observation of intellectuals – a loving satire on people who want to explain everything.
Finally, it is one of Rohmer’s rare films that was not shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, but in 1.66:1.
- Patrick Duynslaegher
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Credits
Éric Rohmer
Anne Teyssèdre, Hugues Quester, Florence Darel
Éric Rohmer
Luc Pagès
María Luisa García
Margaret Ménégoz
Compagnie Eric Rohmer (CER)
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French
France
1990
