Rendezvous in Paris

Opinions about French film director Eric Rohmer tend to diverge sharply into two entrenched camps. One regards the doggedly productive septuagenarian as an ageless treasure of world cinema; the other maintains with equal vehemence that he should have packed it in as far back as 1972, when he finished his Six Moral Tales cycle with Chloe in the Afternoon. While I generally count myself in the pro-Rohmer group I have to admit that Rendezvous in Paris is not likely to cause massive defections to his side. Its three typically modest, unadorned tales of earnest young lovers and would-be lovers walking, talking, conniving, and staging flamboyant breakups in the streets and cafes of Paris will be nourishing comfort food for some, warmed-over hash for others. Set in an idealized Paris of the mind (only the graffiti distinguishes these picturesque tableaux from Chanel ads of the 1950s), Rohmer's scenes unfold at a pace that often feels agonizingly close to real time. His cast of handsome, engaging unknowns are pleasant company, and their amusingly complex relationships spawn even more convoluted discussions about the inscrutable nature of l'amour. But as is often the case with Rohmer, these ingratiating characters register mainly as thinly disguised props to illustrate the director's cerebral musings. That has seldom been a problem for the true believers, who consider Rohmer's sensibility -- a sort of willfully prolonged adolescent whimsy joined with the detached curiosity of a cultural anthropologist -- to be the whole point of his films. Under Rohmer's microscope, we really have seen universes in the water drops of one or two characters' perceptions. Still, it's not asking too much for even an artist working on Rohmer's deliberately modest scale to grow and evolve over time. The fact that Rendezvous in Paris offers about the same depth of insight into love as an episode of Mad About You is more than a little annoying, especially considering the number of static, medium-distance shots of milling pedestrians that we have to endure on the way to these revelations. Speaking of “pedestrian” camera work, Rendezvous is another stark example of how much Rohmer's work has suffered without the visual ingenuity of his erstwhile collaborator, Nestor Almendros. As inspiring as his faith in the written word may be, and as elegantly written as his characters' long verbal encounters often are, it's hard not to wish for a few transcendent images to burn them into our memory.