obscure objects of desire

2011-12-15T05:58:00.000-08:00

Assortments of Eyes: Three Examples

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock / Salvador Dali, 1945)

Blind Beast (Yasuzo Masumura, 1969)

Your Highness (David Gordon Green, 2011)

2011-12-13T08:48:00.000-08:00

squirrels in film

L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat - Auguste and Louis Lumiere (1895)

2011-12-12T06:33:00.000-08:00

Reawakening

2010-12-13T15:35:00.000-08:00

Lost Sondheim Film Recovered

I was just alerted when reading Jonathan Rosenbaum's recent note that Stephen Sondheim's long forgotten made-for-TV musical, Evening Primrose (directed by Paul Bogart and featuring a singing Anthony Perkins), is finally available on DVD, thanks to a newly discovered print. I've had a great desire to see this musical since stumbling across its score when I was 17, and I've always thought its duet, "Take Me to the World," is one of Sondheim's loveliest songs, even if it is also one of his simplest in terms of structure. Despite the fact that Bogart's film premiered in 1966, chalk this one up as one of my must-sees for 2010.

2010-12-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

Blogger critic Michael J. Anderson just posted his top picks for 2010, the majority of which I haven't seen yet and probably will not be seeing for a good while, given my current living situation. However, considering that he includes many of my favorite directors (Weerasethakul, Kiarostami, de Oliveira), and considering how often Anderson has acted as a guiding hand in the development of my own taste in film, I have a feeling that my personal "top ten" wouldn't be too far off, provided I had unlimited access to his choices.

Anderson's list is here.

2010-12-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

squirrels in film

The Seventh Seal - Ingmar Bergman (1957)
Obtained 12/08/10 by The Wienie King

2010-12-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

The American
(Anton Corbijn, 2010)

I’d be more inclined to recommend Anton Corbijn’s moody thriller if it didn’t borrow so heavily from other, greater filmmakers: nineties-era Abbas Kiarostami (in its attention to the spatial environment of villages and long shots of cars driving on deserted roads), Jean-Pierre Melville (in its overall mood and tone, not to mention its sexist depiction of women as exclusively betrayers or whores), and Jim Jarmusch (whose underrated The Limits of Control this film essentially copies in its foreign-based geography, repressed action, and minimalist acting of its lead). To his credit, Corbijn sandwiches these second-rate derivations between a nice anti-Hollywood opening and a fairly satisfying conclusion. I also find Corbijn’s film vastly more preferable than his arty Ian Curtis biopic, Control, even if some of that film’s irritating tendencies to make a religious martyr of its self-loathing protagonist seep into this film via a series of trite conversations on sin and guilt between George Clooney and an elderly Catholic priest played by Paolo Bonacelli (an Italian actor whose past involvements in Caligula and Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom likely invest his character with more dark nuances than his performance actually deserves). Corbijn’s film is better when it stops trying to underscore itself with Big Themes and simply concentrates on the ceremonial routines of Clooney’s custom arms maker, where the clickety-clack assemblage of disparate gunnery pieces achieves a kind of aural purity. Such scenes never quite reach the sensual spirituality that Robert Bresson achieved through sound in films like Lancelot du lac, but they are nevertheless the only moments when Corbijn’s film acquires some depth and is not merely a surface-level imitation.

2010-12-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Chaplin meets Gandhi: Canning Town, London, September 22, 1931

2010-12-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
(Edgar Wright, 2010)

In this spirited adaptation of the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Michael Cera, parodying his now-typecast persona as insecure slacker, plays the title hero—a 22-year-old man-child who plays bass for a really terrible rock band called “Sex Bob-omb,” works as a spokesperson for the Ironic T-Shirt fashion industry, and frequents the local Goodwill and indie record store more out of what seems a civic duty than for actual pleasure. While enjoying the casual emotional abuse of a sweet Chinese high-school student named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong, cast as the only character in the entire film whose company I would reasonably enjoy in real life), Pilgrim finds his life in sudden crisis when he one day falls for the fashionably depressive-moody, multicolored-haired new girl in town (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and must engage in a series of video-game styled battles with the girl’s seven evil ex-boyfriends (the wittiest creation being Brandon Routh as a vegan rockstar whose dietary lifestyle gives him Superman-like powers). As with his send-up of/homage to the buddy-cop genre, Hot Fuzz, director Edgar Wright sometimes teeters on the fine line between satire and exploitation, but I have no real complaints with a film that is so obviously indebted to the inventive formal playfulness of Frank Tashlin, as particularly demonstrated in the polygonal Universal logo that opens the film and the shapeshifting of its widescreen format to convey Pilgrim’s emotional state. (Suggested alternate title: Will Success Spoil Scott Pilgrim?) Moreover, for once the hipster scene is justly depicted as it really is: as a self-contained fantasy world, where one’s juvenile sense of victimhood elevates others to the level of dueling antagonists, and where the desire to be socially labeled causes everything in sight to be purposelessly categorized with decorative textual graphics. Although Wright’s incorporation of the video-game aesthetic from O’Malley’s comic book is probably intended to be nostalgic and affectionate (as it certainly is), it also exposes the social limitations of its characters’ narcissistic, ho-hum attitudes.

2010-12-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

I Love You Phillip Morris
(Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2009)

Although I don’t recall seeing his name in the credits, the influence of Alan Ball’s feel-bad satire (American Beauty, television’s Six Feet Under) reeks throughout this bio-dramedy about Steven Jay Russell, a real-life con artist who became rather infamous in Texas for his multiple escapes from prison. Co-directed by Glenn Ficara and John Requa, the screenwriting team that penned the much better Bad Santa, this lacks the warmth that Terry Zwigoff knew how to bring to the coarsest of material and winds up being merely coarse in its equal hatred of religious fundamentalism and gay secularism alike (or at least the simplified caricatures of said sub-cultures that this film borrows from Ball’s American Beauty). Jim Carrey, playing the con artist who falls for a shy, sweet-natured inmate (Ewan McGregor, in the rather undeveloped title role), honorably tries to bring some life to the cynical atmosphere with the childish kitsch he learned in the Ace Ventura films. (I liked the playful, and likely improvised, exchange of “good nights” between him and daughter in an early scene.) The underlying problem is that it’s difficult to care about his character, much less empathize with him as much as Ficara and Requa do. It’s despicable enough that the filmmakers expect us to laugh when Carrey’s Russell has a mentally troubled inmate brutally beaten as a sign of affection for Morris, but when he uses one of his more elaborate cons to deceive not only Morris but also the film viewers themselves, it becomes clear that the filmmakers are aligning themselves with their cruel protagonist in a manner that I found condescending. By the end, the best they can offer in defense of Russell’s amoral behavior is the suggestion that his actions pissed off then-governor George W. Bush—a mundane plea for sympathy that is nevertheless guaranteed to flatter fashionable, comfortably middle-class liberals (probably the film’s target audience). Spielberg at least knew how to have fun with the mechanics of conning when he tackled similar material in Catch Me If You Can; Ficara and Requa, unfortunately, are too busy satirizing every scene with their glib worldview to even provide an interesting (much less believable) depiction of its own subject matter. All in all, one of the more unpleasant films I’ve seen in a long time.

2010-12-03T08:48:00.000-08:00

squirrels in film

Zodiac - David Fincher (2007)

2010-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

Sarrisms

“[T]he custard-pie sequence in The Great Race transcends the psychology of slapstick to qualify as the last spasm of action painting in the Western world.”

“Billy Wilder is too cynical too believe even in his own cynicism.”

“Fuller is an authentic American primitive whose works have to be seen to be understood. Seen, not heard or synopsized.”

“Perhaps there is not in Zinnemann enough of the redeeming outrageousness of the compulsive entertainer. In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime.”

2010-12-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

Commentary Commentaries

One of my fellow film connoisseurs took unfair advantage of my near-addictive weakness for making lists and suggested that I write about some of my favorite DVD audio commentaries. Having taken the bait, here are my personal top ten, in alphabetical order by film, along with my own brief commentaries. (This is not finished, Joel!)

Julie Jones on Belle de jour. As smart and insightful as it is, I include this commentary mainly for the way the genteel, Southern-speaking voice of film scholar Julie Jones is interspersed over some of Luis Bunuel’s most blatant depictions of his privately erotic (and male-oriented) obsessions. The juxtaposition makes for an extended surreal gag worthy of Bunuel himself.

Francis Ford Coppola on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Heartfelt, affectionate, and sometimes quirky (especially when he’s talking about reading Stoker’s novel to young boys at summer camp or renting a hot air balloon for the cast), Coppola’s commentary for his underappreciated horror epic—my favorite of his films, and certainly a lot more fun than his Godfather saga—reveals a true cinephile as obsessive as Guy Maddin, but thankfully without the Freudian excess.

Zak Penn, Werner Herzog, and various others on Incident at Loch Ness. I’m still not sure how successful Penn’s mockumentary of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and of Herzog fandom in general actually is (perhaps because Penn is too much of a fan himself to properly skewer Herzog’s persona), but his commentary—featuring Penn, Herzog, and a number of others—is a laugh riot, especially when Herzog, disgusted by Penn’s exploitation of his actors, exclaims “Jeff Goldblum is your clown!” and leaves the session within the first fifteen minutes.

Roman Polanski on The Ninth Gate. Despite the lackluster critical reception it received when released in 1999, The Ninth Gate has always been one of my personal favorites by Polanski, and his commentary—a rare treat, given his admitted reluctance to revisit his work—helps to explain why. Polanski’s self-analysis highlights the meticulous (and conservatively classical) craftsmanship he brings to material that lesser directors would treat as just another money-making genre exercise. He also instructively suggests that this subtly humorous film, sometimes critically dismissed for being not as scary as Rosemary’s Baby, is probably closer in spirit to the similarly underrated The Fearless Vampire Killers.

John Fawell on Rear Window. Expectations are pretty high for the man who wrote the book Rear Window: The Well-Made Film, and although I’m still not convinced that this is Hitchcock’s most “well-made” feature (that would be Vertigo), John Fawell’s commentary is fairly outstanding and exhaustively researched. Fawell analyzes just about everything, and I mean everything, from the family outside Stewart’s window who often escapes his gaze (revealing, Fawell explains, Stewart’s aversion to starting a family of his own) to the symbolic significance of the various photographs in his room. Avoiding platitudes, Fawell keeps the majority of his observations centered around his simple, yet endlessly provocative, thesis: that Rear Window is ultimately a movie about movie-watching itself.

Jeffrey Angles on Sansho the Bailiff. I usually prefer Tony Rayns as my guide when exploring Asian territory in Criterion land, but Japanese-literature professor Jeffrey Angles is probably the appropriate choice for my favorite film by Mizoguchi Kenji. What Angles lacks in Rayns’s cinematic eclecticity he makes up for in national specificity, contextualizing the film within a steady grasp of Japanese history, geography, literature, politics, and language. Listening to Angles’s insightful commentary is a reminder of how limited English subtitles are in fully conveying the various cultural nuances of films outside one’s native country.

Peter Bogdanovich on Targets. For me Bogdanovich has always been one of most aesthetically pleasing of film commentators—even when what he says is not particularly interesting or remarkable, his relaxed, old-geezer-in-a-rocking-chair manner is always agreeable to the ear and the perfect cure for insomnia. However, Bogdanovich’s commentary for his striking first feature—still one of the scariest movies ever made—is exceptional for the numerous insights it provides into the film’s conception and production, much of which is more fascinating than the film itself and serves as a final testament to the creative energy that can be sparked by studio-mandated restrictions. Particularly enlightening is Bogdanvich’s acknowledgement that Samuel Fuller had a hand in the script and, I strongly suspect, in the direction as well.

Adrian Martin on 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. You have to give Australian film critic Adrian Martin credit for simply agreeing to tackle one of Godard’s first forays into essay filmmaking that, in its encyclopedic and referential nature, is already a kind of commentary in itself. However, Martin does a capable job at juggling everything Godard’s film throws at him and, in the justly famous coffee cup scene, even helps to situate the French director as more than a mere political agitator but rather as a filmmaker whose unorthodox techniques oftentimes reach for the spiritually transcendent.

Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Kurt Russell on Used Cars. A fun and nostalgic group commentary for Zemeckis’s horrifically hilarious (and still only R-rated) second feature that serves as a welcome reminder of the kind of anarchic and slightly avant-garde sensibility Zemeckis once was capable of before Forrest Gump signaled a decision to move away from this so-called “kid’s” stuff. If all the uproarious laughter and fond memories shared here says anything, Used Cars was clearly a blast to make—one only hopes that, after joining his old buddies for this infectiously affectionate get-together, Zemeckis has thought about someday directing another savagely satirical send-up of Americana (perhaps this time in performance capture technique?).

Edward Yang and Tony Rayns on Yi Yi. I’ve always been impressed by the sheer breadth of Tony Rayns’s cinematic knowledge (he’s just as at home talking about Dreyer’s Vampyr as he is Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses), but what makes his co-commentary with Taiwanese director Edward Yang something special—aside from the fact that Yang just recently died about four years ago—is the manner in which Rayns modestly downplays his obvious credentials as one of leading critics of Asian cinema for the sake of paying respect to the master. When Rayns, for example, asks Yang if the bright colors in the film’s opening wedding sequence are meant to be satirical and Yang replies that this is actually how Chinese weddings are decorated, it’s testimony to Rayns’s gentlemanlike demeanor (not to mention his self-confidence as a critic) that he doesn’t respond defensively at all to Yang’s correction. This and many other cases provide an exemplary model of how to be a film critic without losing one’s humility.

2010-06-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

The Advantages of Remaining Parallel

In his short story “The Form of Space," Italo Calvino describes three celestial “characters”—Qfwfq, Ursula H’x, and Lieutenant Fenimore—who find themselves falling down parallel trajectories within the infinite reaches of outer space. Qfwfq, longing for intimacy with the beautiful Ursula, laments,

I too, naturally, dreamed only of meeting Ursula H’x, but since, in my fall, I was following a straight line absolutely parallel to the one she followed, it seemed inappropriate to reveal such an unattainable desire.

Because his orbit runs parallel to the object of his love and consequently dashes any hope that they will ever intersect, Qfwfq tries to conceal his amorous affection from Ursula. Why, after all, reveal to her a wish that can never be granted, a desire that can never be fulfilled? Qfwfq cannot bear to reveal his love to Ursula, for fear of making known to her a desire that is ultimately impossible. His passion is thus disguised, masked in his belief that it is impractical and unattainable. Better, Qfwfq believes, to remain content with the parallel relationship he has with Ursula, learning to adjust his self to the continuous space that lies between their respective bodies.

= =

In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes remains ambivalent about the ability of the subject, through either sacrificial chivalry or masochistic impulse, to completely disguise his feelings for the object of his love, since the very act of disguising always refers to the desire itself. As Barthes himself so aptly puts it,

Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

The subject, even in his repression (such as in Qfwfq’s concealment of his love for Ursula), must nevertheless make his repression known—his repression is not really an action but a sign. The subject, in other words, wants to communicate to his secret love how much he is sacrificing in not communicating his passion, as contradictory as this statement may be: You must know how much I am giving up by my refusal to let you know how much I feel for you.

In order to make known what is concealed, to establish a presence of love through its very absence, the subject finds ways to communicate his feelings outside of the direct route, perhaps by exhibiting a new personality or by withdrawing longer than usual from his beloved’s company. He may, for example, refuse to answer messages from his beloved, waiting to see how she will react to his absence. (Will she care? If so, how much will she care? Will it be as much as I care when she herself, out of admittedly no ill will, delays responses to my own messages?)

Fortunately, the creative subject need not go to such rash extremes—he may hide his passion in his work, his paintings, his music, or his writing. (Calvino hides in metaphors; Barthes in poststructuralism.) In this modern and increasingly indiscreet age, blogs are an agreeable choice for simultaneous disclosure/nondisclosure of one’s secret passion, since in this medium the subject may intimately address his beloved in a manner disguised as public forum: I pretend this is merely another post in a long series of other innocuous posts, but if only you knew the truth. I put on a show as if it were intended for an entire audience, but in my performance I can never manage to keep myself from addressing you alone. Or, to defer once again to Barthes:

Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator: […] no amorous oblation without a final theater: the sign is always victorious.

= =

Secretly, Qfwfq anticipates a meeting with Ursula in the distant future, believing “there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.” It is his longing for this glorious “touch” with Ursula that motivates Qfwfq in his present state:

This eventuality gave me some hope; indeed, it kept me in a state of constant excitement. I don’t mind telling you I had dreamed so much of a meeting of our parallels, in great detail, that it was no part of my experience, as if I had actually lived it.

Is Qfwfq’s hope for an eventual “meeting of our parallels” false? In Euclidean geometry, certainly, but subsequent mathematical theory tells us that in hyperbolic space two parallel geodesics may actually intersect as their limits approach infinity. A cause for celebration? Perhaps, but infinity is still infinity, and there is no telling how long it may take these two lovers to reach their eventual connection—it may very well last a number of human lifetimes (it’s a good thing these aren’t mortal beings Calvino is discussing).

Still, Qfwfq hopes, and it is this very hope that sustains him. He anticipates the intersection, which—like the use of foreshadowing in a novel—pushes his movement forward to a predetermined ending, no matter how far away this ending may be. Qfwfq is motivated by his expectation of the intersecting climax, perhaps slightly aware of this climax’s inability to equal its own anticipation. A self-fulfilling prophecy, after all, is not fulfilled in its eventual occurrence but rather in its initial projection.

= =

In his structuralist study Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gérard Genette remarks on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s notion of the “primultimateness” of the anticipated first time:

[T]hat is, the fact that the first time, to the very extent to which one experiences its inaugural value intensely, is at the same time always (already) a last time—if only because it is forever the last to have been the first, and after it, inevitably, the sway of repetition and habit begins.

Genette applies Jankélévitch’s idea to Swann and Odette’s first kiss in Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, particularly to the following passage from the novel, in which Swann briefly hesitates just as he is about to fulfill his long-anticipated desire of claiming Odette:

Perhaps, moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view of a country to which he many never return.

In finally gaining the physical Odette, Swann also loses a part of the Odette he loved: the Odette whose far-reaching proximity motivated Swann to pursue her; the Odette who, in some sense, walked parallel to Swann, ever distant yet constantly near.

= =

Although Qfwfq is somewhat jealous in his suspicion that Ursula and Fenimore might have once intersected in their past, he finds some relief in the geometrical relativity of the situation:

On reflecting, however, I reasoned that if Ursula and the Lieutenant had once occupied the same point in space, this meant that their respective lines of fall had since been moving apart and presumably were still moving apart. Now, in this slow but constant removal from the Lieutenant, it was more than likely that Ursula was coming closer to me; so the Lieutenant had little to boast of in his past conjunctions: I was the one at whom the future smiled.

Indeed, even if Qfwfq and Ursula are continuously parallel to one another, this will at least allow Qfwfq to retain a closer distance to his beloved than all of Ursula’s previous intersecting lovers—despite the momentary bliss of touch they felt in their direct contact with Ursula, these former lovers will overtime only drift further and further apart from her. Qfwfq and Ursula, on the other hand, although seemingly separate until infinity, will never lose the closeness they possess within their stable, parallel trajectory. By staying apart, they will remain, in a very real sense, always together.

And who knows? Maybe infinity is just around the corner.

2010-02-25T21:21:00.000-08:00

Rohmer mon amour (éventuelle)

Although I was initially going to let my “top ten” list (see below) serve as my sole acknowledgment of Rohmer’s passing, I have since found myself unexpectedly and continuously moved by the death of the great French filmmaker. Perhaps I feel this way because I am only a recent convert to this most modest of the Nouvelle Vague auteurs. Of the five or six filmmakers I would consider to be personal favorites today (including Alain Resnais, David Cronenberg, and Hou Hsiao-hsien), Rohmer is the one director in this list whose ranking has undergone the most drastic upheaval.

Indeed, if you had asked me my opinion of Rohmer just a little over a year ago, I would have mentioned my fondness for elements of critical favorites like A Tale of Autumn and My Night at Maud’s, especially the latter's irresistable application of statistical theory to romantic love, but then would have admitted that his naturalism on the whole rather aggravated me, particularly in what I then considered to be a frequent refusal to divert his attention away from characters who I found to be shallow and a bit bourgeois in their intellectual prattle (something I myself, in retrospect, can admit I indulge in more often than I care to admit). I recall almost turning off in irritation The Green Ray—today my favorite film by Rohmer—during a scene when its protagonist, played by Marie Rivière, makes a big deal about her vegetarian habits while dining with some fellow vacationers. Neither did the self-absorbed actions of the male protagonist in A Tale of Summer do much to alleviate my aversion to what I interpreted to be on Rohmer's part a limited perspective—one that, as I wrote in my summary of the film back in 2007, seemed (to me at the time) hopelessly uncommitted to any kind of meaningful cause, political or otherwise.

If I was initially repelled by Rohmer’s characters, my feelings may only be a tribute to the filmmaker’s remarkably undetectable mise-en-scène, which formed enough of a nonjudgmental playing field for my own judgmental emotions to take free reign (often against the films themselves, ironically). Even before I realized this, however, I felt compelled about four months ago to give The Green Ray a second chance, despite my initial dismissal that it was a silly fairy tale for the lovesick upper-class. As I watched Rohmer’s film a second time, something astonishing happened: I began to develop a real compassion for Rivière’s wandering heroine, this person who had initially irritated me to no end. True, I still found some of her personality quirks a bit pretentious, but my critical opinion suddenly became beside the point. Through Rohmer’s refusal to subject Rivière to invasive close-ups or surround her with non-diegetic music, I increasingly felt that I was being asked not to identify with his protagonist per se but to simply observe her. Seeing Rivière break into tears during two or three key scenes in The Green Ray, my feelings for her character and my awareness of her artificiality as an actor began to come into excruciating conflict. Never had the “fourth wall” of cinema felt so invisible and yet simultaneously so devastatingly permanent, its existence only proven in my inability to comfort Rivière as she cried alone—alone, and yet observed by all, through Rohmer’s discreet, almost transparent camera lens.

What my epiphanic second viewing of The Green Ray revealed to me was that, like Howard Hawks at his most leisurely paced (e.g., Only Angels Have Wings, Rio Bravo), Rohmer persistently—and yet with a consistent, astonishing ease—worked to chip away the formalistic self-consciousness of cinema advocated by a more Brechtian peer like Jean-Luc Godard, thereby allowing his viewers to make intimate contact with his protagonists that nevertheless enhances the distance positioned between observed and observer. In other words, Rohmer's singular ability to draw his viewers so near to the emotions of his characters signifies—by process of a kind of poststructuralist différance—an awareness of cinema’s artificial presence itself, one just as alienating as Godard.

Let me put it another way: In pushing his naturalism to its uppermost limits, by bringing us as close to his characters as is cinematically possible, Rohmer better alerts us to the insufferable fact that the projection screen can never be completely shattered. He essentially suggests that, like his own protagonists who often have difficulty understanding their most intimate acquaintances (particularly apparent in his wonderful "Comedies & Proverbs" series of the '80s), we as viewers can never completely make contact with these characters’ thoughts and emotions, either, no matter how much Rohmer increases our proximity to them. This fragile yet undeviating gap between spectator and spectacle thus becomes a metaphor for the gap between our subjectivity and that of other human beings, where the suspension of disbelief Rohmer perfects in his naturalism only serves as a reminder of the same suspension we perpetuate in our self-deceptive belief that we can ever fully comprehend the thoughts and feelings of another person. No matter how much we strive to signify ourselves to others through words, gestures, and expressions (like the intellectual prattle of the male protagonist in My Night at Maud's or the tearful breakdown of Rivière near the end of The Aviator's Wife), Rohmer implies that the essence of who we are will always remain unknowable to everyone except ourselves, despite others' best efforts to give us their idea of comfort and affection.

It is finally this separation between the audience and Rohmer’s protagonists, however, that makes the resolutions in many of his films so affecting. When the scattered lovers of L'Ami de mon amie or A Tale of Autumn find their perfect matches, when the male hero of Claire’s Knee makes contact with the object of his desire, when concealed identity is revealed at the finale of Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, or when Rivière finally finds true love through a kind of divine intervention itself at the end of The Green Ray, Rohmer is in all these instances generously offering his characters a merciful resolution that his viewers, in their permanent role as distant observers, could never grant even if they wished to. Stepping in for the presupposed benevolence of his audience, Rohmer induces a compassion in his viewers that does not depend on their direct intercession—a compassion, in other words, that delights in witnessing the joy of others without taking credit for supplying this joy. By pushing his naturalism to such a maximum value that it exposes the inevitable alienation inherent in cinema, Rohmer teaches us how to love others from afar, which in the end may be the only way we can really love others anyway.