This past spring I was preparing for an oral French exam with the real-life equivalent of the videogame “final boss” that many federal functionaries in Canada must face. My tutor sensed that I was overthinking the grammar as I was trying to speak and said, “But how did you learn your mother tongue? And why do you think that somehow as an adult your approach needs to be different?” 

Duly chastened, I decided to incorporate the basic practices that propel language acquisition in the young—the need to understand, to communicate, to take pleasure in hearing and response. That is how I rediscovered Éric Rohmer. 

I had seen Rohmer’s series Six Moral Tales (1962−1972) several years prior and was struck by what film critic Imogen Sara Smith calls Rohmer’s films’ “long finish; they linger and grow richer in the mind.” Another series by Rohmer, Tales of the Four Seasons (1990−1998), had just been restored and released together in early 2024, and it seemed a perfect oeuvre to assist me in my personal pedagogy. Taking in four films in three days (the bingeing justified as “homework”) greatly amplified their potency. I sensed anew what New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote about Rohmer’s work upon the filmmaker’s death in 2010: “The action meanders but seems held together with a relentlessly unifying purity of cinematic style and idealistic intentions.” 

Despite being revered in the world of film critics and cinephiles, Rohmer is relatively unknown outside those rarefied circles and deserves a wider audience. In addition to being one of the great auteurs of the late twentieth century, he had a firm and abiding Catholic faith twinned by a tender and serious marital fidelity, both of which seeped into his vision and filmmaking in spite of his great efforts to separate his professional life and personal life. 

Luigi Giussani, the founder of the lay Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, wrote a trilogy of catechetical texts known as the PerCorso (Italian for “itinerary” or “path”). These writings detail the human journey to discovering the God who reveals himself and fulfills our destiny. Rohmer’s three film cycles (the third being Comedies and Proverbs [1981−1987]), I believe, evoke the central themes found in Giussani’s PerCorso and help us realize our own place once more along this path. I will illustrate this by selecting one film from each cycle. 

Loneliness and Longing: Le rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1986) 

In The Green Ray, the protagonist, Delphine, lives alone in a small apartment in Paris and works an uninteresting clerical job. When a carefully planned trip with a friend is unexpectedly cancelled, Delphine is at a loss as to how to meaningfully spend her summer vacation, even as options abound. For most of the film, she flits from place to place looking to find something and someone interesting. 

Delphine’s search for a good vacation symbolizes a deeper longing. The hint of a past fiancé hovers like a ghost, and it slowly becomes clear that the breakup is not fresh but happened several years ago and recedes ever more with each wistful recollection. In an early scene, she visits extended family with whom she does not exactly feel close to. An older male character, perhaps an uncle, confesses that, as a cab driver in Paris, he never really had vacations as a younger man. Unable to think of anything else to do with his leisure time, he simply stayed put and worked through the summers. When he admits that “I was sixty years old before I even saw the sea,” one can read the dismay in Delphine’s face despite a bemused smile: “My God, I don’t want to live that way!” Scenes like this give the viewer a keen sense of her contemporariness. 

Like so many of Rohmer’s films, including the others we will consider, The Green Ray carries a noticeable lingering of ennui. Here in the pre-internet age (whose advantages are so often nostalgically evoked in the smartphone era), boredom cannot be sated with the quick swipe of a hand, so it lingers. The discomfort with and perseverance through this boredom is often what leads to epiphany. Geoffrey O’Brien has noted that there “is no pause like a Rohmerian pause.” The lack of musical score leaves room for silence and transition from one place or mood to the next. In a visceral way, Delphine’s anguish and vulnerability (she is given to crying openly in unexpected moments with or without company) is captured sharply by the camera’s tarrying, soundless gaze. 

The eponymous green ray is a reference (Rohmer’s films are filled with literary allusions) to a novel by the French writer Jules Verne. The green ray is an optical phenomenon that, if the sky is sufficiently clear, can sometimes be seen at the very end of the day as the sun sets over a body of water. There is a reference in Verne’s book—echoed in Rohmer’s film—that seeing the green ray would enable you to read your own feelings clearly as well as the feelings of the one you see it with. Delphine repeatedly ventures out (joining an acquaintance’s family at their seaside home, going to the ski slopes she frequented with her erstwhile fiancé) and then pulls back, seeing the futility of her efforts to find meaningful connection. References to the colour green and other signs, such as finding playing cards, pop up intermittently, hinting that something will emerge around the bend in due time. 

Lounging on a beach in Biarritz, a coastal resort town, Delphine meets a happy-go-lucky Swedish tourist, Léna. Léna views life as a mischievous character out to play a con on us, and the best way to adapt is to not take it seriously but play along, keeping one’s distance. Léna’s easy satisfaction with life and its wiles seems a stinging rebuke to Delphine’s stubborn punctiliousness. (At one point Delphine exclaims, “But I’m not stubborn, it’s life that’s stubborn!”) Just before calling a couple of younger men over to a table that she is sharing with Delphine, Léna states that romance is simply like a card game that “you play with others”; nothing serious is ever risked. 

It is only on her way back to Paris, sitting alone in a train station, that Delphine meets Jacques. She invites herself to a daylong outing with him to a small fishing village, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the Basque country close to the Spanish border. During a sun-splashed outdoor patio conversation, she confesses that “few men really look at a woman.” In Delphine’s observation, their eros is never particular and avid, but abstract and insipid, and thus fails to arouse a commensurate response, leaving both partners in a superficial sexual encounter more desolate following their cursory consummation. In detailing the emptiness of one such encounter, where neither she nor her partner really cared or risked vulnerability, Delphine says to Jacques, “I find that much more horrible than loneliness,” and adds, “It’s better to wait for something [that corresponds to your heart] than settle for [a mundane, practical] reality.” 

From here, as we progress toward the end of the film where they will see the green ray together, we as the viewers get an unblemished perception of what is at stake for us too. Do our own longings have a proportionate response and fulfillment, or are they simply a hallucination in a material brain? Rohmer makes the case that our searching is not just an end in itself but for something, for someone, for our desires to be realized in an authentic way. Giussani’s writing in The Religious Sense resonates with this assertion: “Freedom, for the human being, is the possibility, the capacity, the responsibility to be fulfilled, that is to say to reach and face one’s destiny. . . . [It] is the experience of the truth of ourselves.” In experiencing the green ray together, unexpectedly, we see Jacques and Delphine embrace, and we simultaneously recognize that they’ve found something more than a possible romantic partner. They have found the truth about themselves, like Nathanael when he hears the words of Christ, “When you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” 

In an understated way, The Green Ray is like a quiet friend who sidles up to you and suddenly pushes you off the dock into the fresh, cold water you’ve spent a little too long tentatively observing, catching you by surprise, shocking you into the gleeful and grateful recognition of being alive. 

Expectation and Discovery: Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter, 1992) 

The prologue of A Tale of Winter is brief and wondrous. A young couple—who are not introduced in any way—share scenes of summertime gaiety and intimacy in a town they seem to be holidaying in. At their parting on a train platform, the young woman, Félicie, accidentally names the wrong town (Courbevoie instead of Levallois) as she gives her home address to her lover, Charles, who notes it down. 

The next scene cuts to a grey, wintry Paris five years later, and we see the presence in Félicie’s life of two other romantic interests: Loïc, a fastidious, faithful Catholic and librarian, and Maxence, a virile man of the world and hairdresser. Then it dawns quickly on us that, owing to Félicie’s innocent misstatement, the wrong address meant that Charles was lost to her (in a manner that seems improbable in today’s hyper-connected world). We discover, too, that the tryst between Félicie and Charles has resulted in a daughter, Élise, now nearly five. The only other proof of Charles’s existence is the photos Félicie took during their brief time together. 

In her vacillation between Maxence and Loïc, Félicie retells (not only for us viewers as a narrative device but also for herself) her story of finding and losing a great love in one’s youth. We get a glimpse of her frantic efforts to find and re-establish ties with Charles, only to end with a subdued surrender. 

Félicie, needing to make a decision about whether to stay with Loïc in Paris or choose another life, visits Maxence, who wants to move to his smaller hometown of Nevers and bring both Félicie and Élise there with him. He proposes staying in a small apartment, shabbily furnished, atop a hair salon that Félicie would also work in. As she considers Maxence’s proposal, Félicie agrees to visit Nevers for a weekend. As they walk around town, they stop at a former convent and briefly look at the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary gave rise to the now-famous pilgrimage site at Lourdes. St. Bernadette’s faithfulness to her vision remained steadfast despite skepticism from nearly everyone at the outset. At first, the juxtaposition of Félicie with Bernadette seems jarring. While Félicie can seem irrational and irritating in her impulsivity, as the film progresses, she emerges as a character who, in the words of Imogen Sara Smith, “becomes Rohmer’s ultimate avatar of faithfulness to one’s destiny.” In other words, not so different in disposition from Bernadette. 

Élise seems unhappy in the small apartment in Nevers, so one day Félicie interrupts her work and takes her to the park. Seeing a large cathedral nearby, Élise begs to see the crèche with the infant Jesus. While reluctantly letting Élise drag her along, Félicie has an epiphany. She decides to stake everything on her total fulfillment—namely, finding Charles again. When she leaves Maxence and Nevers as swiftly as she came, what appears as impetuousness is actually courage. 

As Félicie returns to Paris with a vision of a fantastical reunion with Charles, she initially settles for what seems like a more practical reunion with Loïc instead. It appears that all her epiphany resulted in was to choose the better of two available options (leave Maxence and choose Loïc), and yet we glimpse a new determination in Félicie to never settle for anything less than total happiness. Even as Loïc is rational about his Catholic faith, it is Félicie, in her refusal to compromise, who demonstrates a more reasonable faith. In Giussani’s words, she exhibits “an openness to reality, a capacity to seize and affirm it in all of its factors.” Attending a French production of Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale with Loïc, Félicie has a second epiphany. On the car ride home, they discuss the story of King Leontes’s restoration to a wife and daughter he believed dead, and Félicie reminds Loïc that Pascal’s wager is something found not simply by reading a book or holding a belief but by experiencing Real Presences. 

As viewers, we are left to hope in expectant waiting with Félicie. The decorations and weather indicate that the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) is nearing and that we, too, must consider the possibility of saying with her that for “a joy so great [being reunited with Charles], I’ll gladly give my life for it.” The conclusion does not leave us with cloying sentimentality but provokes a deeper pondering of Christ’s affirmation of his mother: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” 

Fidelity and Renewal: L’amour l’après-midi (Love in the Afternoon, 1972) 

In his track “Staying in Love,” Raphael Saadiq croons, “Falling in love can be easy, staying in love is too tricky.” Love in the Afternoon deals with this thorny, intractable question: “Now that I’ve found a great and true love, how do we contentedly and chastely keep house together?” Chastity here denotes, in the formulation of Erik Varden, a “reconciliation of the senses.” It is a question of growing old, maturing well, not simply within a romantic relationship or in piety, but in a fullness that denotes a continuity—if not unity—across all the aspects of our lives. 

Frédéric is a lawyer who works in the heart of Paris while living in the suburbs with a working wife, a child, and another on the way. His life is almost a postcard portrait of Simone de Beauvoir’s adage “The years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical.” In the film’s early scenes, we follow Frédéric as he takes the train into the city. He holds a book rather than a newspaper (the smartphone scrolling of the pre-internet era) yet pauses to look at people, mostly attractive young women, and muses what his life would be like had he chosen such-and-such pretty young thing rather than his wife. His assumption, all too common today, is that his life rests solely on his choices and not on what has been given to him. Frédéric also loves the frisson of being among the crowds and wandering the chic streets near Le Bougainville in Paris’s historic second arrondissement. Yet he rarely takes the famously long lunches the French are known for. Rather, he waits a little later, till mid-afternoon, before slipping out to a café to people-watch. Frédéric justifies his reveries by insisting to himself that he envies no one; they are simply a salve to soothe the dread of the afternoons, which remind him of his predictable home and professional life, as he concedes that the “quiet happiness stretching out before me depresses me.” 

Into this harmless play-acting enters the character of Chloé, the ex of a formerly close friend. She barges into his office unexpectedly, disrupting his rhythms and pushing his apparently anodyne mores to their limit. What starts with small practical favours (requests for a job, help finding a place to stay) gradually develops into longer outings during the very same afternoons Frédéric, now pulled into an active amorous dalliance, once engaged in his passive onlooking. 

As these not-so-clandestine afternoon meetings continue (Chloé has no fear of Frédéric’s wife, Hélène, discovering them together), Frédéric muses whether it would be possible to live two separate lives, without one touching the other. Chloé is emphatic in response: “No, it’s impossible.” Chloé’s presence then becomes inconsistent, unsettling Frédéric; she disappears for stretches without explanation. And following the birth of Frédéric’s second child, a son, Chloé becomes much more forward about consummating their affair. Her envy of Hélène with her children pushes her to ask Frédéric to father a child, with no strings attached. Frédéric’s brooding consideration of Chloé’s indecent proposal exemplifies what Richard Brody has termed “the embodiment of terrifyingly strong passions and of equally terrifying, and slightly stronger, repression” in Rohmer’s films. 

Yet framing things this way does not quite get to the heart of the matter. The film critic Armond White notes that the “appearance of Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in the midst of the sixties’ sexual revolution brought unexpected sobriety to the European sexual drama and the comedy of erotic manners.” We see clearly, in other words, what is truly at stake when fidelity (to a marriage, or our hopes for fulfillment) is under strain and scrutiny. Watching the film for the first time, I was unprepared for its unexpected conclusion. There is perhaps no better affirmation of married life in Western cinema, something approaching the tenderness—even with its tragic dimensions—more evident in Asian cinema, such as that of the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray in Apur Sansar or Devi. In a way, Love in the Afternoon is also the progenitor of the two other movies we’ve considered: Maire Rivière—Delphine in The Green Ray—saw it and wrote to Rohmer asking to work with him, and Charlotte Véry, Félicie in A Tale of Winter, in turn saw The Green Ray and did the same. 

Love in the Afternoon hints at the possibility of what Giussani has termed “the value of a humanity redeemed by Christ.” He says, 

Brody has asserted that “Rohmer’s entire career is centered on one simple idea. Almost all his films have the same underlying structure, the temptation and rejection of a false love while waiting for a true one.” In a world strewn with false loves, Rohmer is a great artistic advocate for hope in “the dearest freshness deep down things,” in poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s phrasing. It is common in Rohmer’s films for an onscreen date to mark a scene. The year, however, is never listed, only the day and month, giving his settings an aura of timelessness within temporality (1970s–1990s) and place (France). Rohmer’s body of work is a tonic for our times. It is a call to persevere through boredom, to stay with the questions, to abide with wonder and expectancy, and to follow our desires all the way through to something whole. Rewatching his films last spring, I felt a closeness to him—despite the differences in culture and era—that helped me think more lucidly about my own loves and hopes. Hopes to be long–suffering and stubbornly faithful to my calling, hopes to ever discern truer loves from counterfeits, hopes to be attentive, open, fruitful, and in bloom with the fragrance of Christ. Please, make some time for Rohmer.