1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 24: (a) Les rendez-vous de Paris; (b) Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud
Both of these movies, released a week apart from one another in the USA, are about men and women who talk about love while keeping it at arm’s length. In Les rendez-vous de Paris, they do much of their talking out of doors, in and around parks, markets, graveyards, and cafés; in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, they talk in restaurants and apartments. All the locations are stereotypically Parisian. Together, the movies suggest: If you want romance, go to Paris; if you want true love, stay away.
The great and prolific director of Rendez-vous is Éric Rohmer. (I’ve already reviewed another of his movies, A Summer’s Tale.) Gene Hackman, playing a hard-boiled detective in Arthur Penn’s thriller, Night Moves (1975), says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” This is correct. In Rendez-vous, the characters literally watch the paint dry in order to talk about it.
Roger Ebert says:
Oh, and this: M. Arnaud and Nelly have money (or, at least, Nelly reasonably expects that she’ll end up with money because of her looks). For the students, scholars, and artists of Rendez-vous, life is more threadbare. This difference also matters.
The great and prolific director of Rendez-vous is Éric Rohmer. (I’ve already reviewed another of his movies, A Summer’s Tale.) Gene Hackman, playing a hard-boiled detective in Arthur Penn’s thriller, Night Moves (1975), says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” This is correct. In Rendez-vous, the characters literally watch the paint dry in order to talk about it.
Roger Ebert says:
I think [Rohmer] believes that love is love and that flirtatious conversation is an entirely separate pleasure, not to be confused with anything else. … What the people in Rendezvous in Paris are really saying, underneath all of their words, is: “I am not available. You are not available. But let us play at being available because it is such a joy to use these words and tease with these possibilities, and so much fun to be actors playing lovers, since Paris provides the perfect set for our performance.” Rohmer splendidly illustrates the theory that Parisians possess two means of sexual intercourse, of which the primary one is the power of speech.Ebert’s review is spot-on, and I have little to add to it. The same is true of his review of Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud:
What a delicate dance they perform. … It is a matter of great erotic fascination when two people are intrigued by the notion of becoming lovers, but are held back by the fear of rejection and the fear of involvement. Signals are transmitted that would require a cryptographer to decode. The difficulty is to send a message that can be read one way if the answer is yes, and the other way if the answer is no.I’ll say nothing about the movies’ respective plots. (Rendez-vous alone contains three separate stories, and each is fairly complex.) I’ll just note this difference between the two movies. In Rendez-vous, the characters are still young, and their flirting is fraught with insecurity. Not so in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Nelly may only be in her twenties, but, as played by Emmanuelle Béart, she’s an expert at wielding her beauty against men. And M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a wily ex-judge and businessman who knows precisely what sort of allure he holds for one such as Nelly. Theirs is a dance, yes, but also a sparring match between two assured veterans. Compared to them, the lovers in Rendez-vous are amateurs.
Oh, and this: M. Arnaud and Nelly have money (or, at least, Nelly reasonably expects that she’ll end up with money because of her looks). For the students, scholars, and artists of Rendez-vous, life is more threadbare. This difference also matters.