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Now I can safely deem I have reached an approximate age to watch Rohmer's canon, mid-30s is a ripe age to broach more cerebral film viewing activities, so my first and random pick is THE AVIATOR'S WIFE, Rohmer's first part of Comedies et Proverbes (6 parts in all) series. The film is capsulized in one-day's span, Francois (Marlaud), a young student whose night shift makes the relationship with his girlfriend Anne (Rivière) in strain, after witnessing Anne left with her ex-lover Christian (Carrière) from her apartment in the morning, and later a sour altercation with Anne, a jealousy-driven Francois compulsively follows Christian and his blonde companion (Caillot), and by happenstance he meets a 15-year-old schoolgirl Lucie (Meury), the two improvise an amateurish but perky private detective team until they find out Christian goes to visit a lawyer. After Lucie departs, Francois visits a stress-inflicted Anne, it seems they reconcile and Francois figures out who the blonde is. When the night falls, Anne is out for an exhausting date and Francois accidentally finds Lucie kiss another boy, so he sends a postcard to her and put a closure to their stalking adventure, the story ends. There is no big twist or melodramatic plots in Rohmer's film, he masterfully recounts the dribs and drabs of emotions pestering one's relationship and daily lives, visceral and empathetic, he unerringly captures the quirks and fluctuations of the characters he writes, no larger-than-life frills, everything returns to an authentic basis which reflects its transfixing mojo, for example, the intricate discovery of the blonde's identity is casually schemed, but never condescending or audience-pandering, truth reveals itself in its most trivial form, also in the park, when Lucie intends to take a Polaroid from two tourists, it is lifelikeness never feel redundant in spite of its overlong progress which would be trimmed in most cinematic presentations, but Rohmer is confident to let his audience to savor the subtle interactions among the players and keeps it vibrant. The sad trivia of the cast is Marlaud would soon die in a tragic camping tent fire accident after completing this film, he was only 22, in the film he interprets a sensitive and diffident boy, who is smitten with Anne, an independent working girl 5 years older than him, their on-and-off rapport is under close scrutiny, and Rivière takes on a more difficult role and dominates the screen especially during her expository declaration of her credo in self-reliance in her tiny apartment. Meury is a delight in the midstream, maybe too quick-witted for a 15-year-old, but her natural self-confidence could easily win audiences over. The titular wife only exists as a glimpse on a picture, whose back-story would illicit another film feature to expound an existential individual's philosophical quandary about affection and compromise. Sadly, there is no Rohmer in this world anymore.

It's hard to explain what exactly is so appealing about the films of Eric Rohmer. A plot summary of any of his films would surely make it sound like a dull affair or possibly even a soapy melodrama. Rohmer's films aren't about plot, however, one might even say they defy plot. Instead of focusing on conventional narrative, Rohmer concentrates on his characters. This is not to say that Rohmer chooses to show extraordinary individuals; the strength of his characters is actually in their ordinariness. His characters seem like people I really know or at the very least like people I might encounter. These characters aren't dumbed down or simplified to be more universal, either; each seems like a uniquely realized person.The Aviator's Wife is about Francois, a Parisian college student/mail sorter and his relationships with his older girlfriend Anne (who he suspects is cheating on him) and Lucie,a younger girl who picks him up in the park. Throughout the film we come to know both the flaws and strengths of these three characters, each of whom is curious (albeit for very different reasons) about a certain aviator and his wife. Francois is naive and clingy but very kind natured, Anne is strong but cruel, and Lucie is cheery and intelligent but also dishonest and coquettish.The Aviator's Wife is the first of Rohmer's six "Comedies and Proverbs" films. The proverb this time around is: "It is impossible to think about nothing." Within the context of the film this seems to refer to the inability of some of the characters to understand the significance (or lack of significance) of the things they hear. This theme works well enough but the film as a whole fails to be as captivating or as interesting as the previous Rohmer films I've seen (those being Pauline at the Beach and The Green Ray). This is especially apparent in the bedroom scene near the end of the film which goes on too long. Still, the comical ending was a fun surprise.

In this bittersweet tale of disconnections and possibilities perhaps we have the essence of the art of Eric Rohmer. If you have only one Rohmer film to see, perhaps you ought to make it this one because it is so very, very French, so interestingly talkative (one of Rohmer's trademarks) and so very, very Rohmer.The Aviator's wife, incidentally does not appear except in a photograph, but that is all to the point. Everything is a bit off stage in this intriguing drama: love especially is a bit off stage. And yet how all the participants yearn.Marie Riviere stars as Anne who is in love with the aviator. We catch her just as she learns that he no longer wants her. He tells her that his wife is pregnant and so he must return to her. Meanwhile, she is being pestered by Francois (Philippe Marlaud) who is in love with her. However he is a little too young and "clinging." Truly she is not interested. It is a disconnection as far as she is concerned.The heart of the film occurs when Francois is following the aviator and the blond woman. Francois is obsessive and jealous. He follows because...it isn't clear and he really doesn't know why except that this is the man that Anne loves. As it happens while he is following them he runs into a pretty fifteen-year-old (Lucie, played fetchingly by Anne-Laure Meury) who imagines that he is following her. She turns it into a game, and again we have a disconnection. She is fun and cute and full of life, but he cannot really see her because he pines for Anne. Meanwhile Anne of course is pining for the aviator.Rohmer's intriguing little joke is about the aviator's wife. Who is she and what is she like? We can only imagine. And this is right. The woman imagines what the other woman is like, but never really knows unless she meets her.Maire Riviere is only passably pretty, but she has gorgeous limbs and beautiful skin and a hypnotic way about her, which Rohmer accentuates in the next to the last scene in her apartment with Francois. We follow the talk between the two, of disconnection and off center possibilities, of friends and lovers with whom things are tantalizingly not exactly right and yet not tragically wrong. As we follow this talk we see that Anne's heart is breaking or has broken--and all the while we see her skin as Francois does. She wants to be touched, but not by him. And then she allows him to touch her, but only in comforting gestures, redirecting his hands away from amorous intent. And then she goes out with a man in whom she really has no interest.Such is life, one might say. Rohmer certainly thinks so.One thing I love about Rohmer's films is that you cannot predict where they will go. Another thing is his incredible attention to authentic detail about how people talk and how they feel without cliché and without any compromise with reality--Rohmer's reality of course, which I find is very much like the reality that I have experienced.See this for Eric Rohmer whose entre into the world of cinema is substantial, original, and wonderfully evocative of what it is like to live in the modern world with an emphasis on personal relationships and love.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

The person of whom we know least is the aviator's woman. This is largely because the emotional topology is neither simple nor relatively stable like the triangular formula it first appears to be.François is too matter-of-fact to go with the flow of this gestalt of rapidly metamorphosing relationships. Like a latter-day Polyphemus, he drowses dimly through a hazily-grasped landscape of romantic artifice, and always fails to get the girl through the folly of an approach so direct as to be lumbering. Because he is so ponderous, Lucie teases him, to relieve her impatience.François threatens the essentially gossamer-like dance of youthful romance – the flirtatious touch-and-go of creatures as yet unburdened with any sense of their mortality. But he also burdens the older Anne with his stolid inability to hurry after and keep company with her advancing sense of years and maturity. He lightly observes to Lucy in the park that he is, chronologically, stuck exactly midway between two women, but it is the formula and not its significance which strikes him.He sleepwalks across a wideawake Paris, from yesterday's literally exhausted love, to the dawning of a new love at a temporal juncture which unfortunately for him does not coincide with the pattern of his shift-distorted days. In a tragic conclusion to this farce of an elementary failure of communication, the student who must work his way through college is shown as forever excluded from the smooth and easy path set before the privileged children of the haut-bourgoisie. Indeed, there is a double tragedy, as Anne still appears to be languishing in an at least emotionally unresolved divorce, and yet age has put her asunder from François, thus robbing both of their natural and mutual haven from those whose fortunate background will ensure that everything will come to them as a matter of course.This is the dark side of Rohmer's generally more sunny world of gently bittersweet dalliance: The film shows the point at which all the lightness must become serious. The pilot and his woman – is she wife? sister? mistress?professional associate? – seem to preside from an aloof and unknowable distance, like Arcadian deities over the cruel twisting of human destiny.Their inexplicable appearances and disappearances mirror the faltering course of human affairs, which do leave most of us more-or-less in the lurch.There is a Mozartian harmony to this conception of how life produces not only winners, but losers as well, yet losers who are not obviously the wilful creators of their own fate. As a portrait of the apparently random strokes of fortune, dealt by the endlessly absconding figure of the vaguely heaven-located ‘aviator,' this film could even be said to breath the air of Classical Greece ... were Rohmer not so conscious of the artifice as to locate the impossible flirtation of Lucy and François in a park all of the bucolic features of which are entirely artificial. Amidst all the pretty lies, one thing is certain: Disillusionment. Yet Rohmer seems to believe – as the subtitle of this film suggests – that such a bleak world of conceptual emptiness would be literally unimaginable for the artist, unsupportable for the creative intelligence. Quintessentially French, it is the rational play of wit that satisfies and expresses this cool, classical sensibility. Here, he deliberately objectifies the limits of his own talent, or human-interest: It is an admittedly delightful formula bounded on one side by the beautifully illuminated world of the aquarium by Anne's bedside, and on the other by the crystalline confection of the snow-shaker in François' nervously occupied hand as she ‘freezes him out', but it is a formula, nonetheless, and can only describe the imagined regions of those with the temporal luxury – the time – to develop such a rareified sensibility.Neither shiftworkers nor disappointed women – the one cruelly pressed for time, the other by it - can luxuriate in that fundamentally aristocratic sense of the infinite possibilities of self – the sense which gives to so many of Rohmer's films their particular quality of timeless dalliance. This is a game for kittenish teenage girls and their attentive swains, and it presents them with no immediate consequences. It is, in short, amidst those who are still young and therefore truly alive that Rohmer wishes to remain. In this film he acknowledges the cruelty implicit in the intuition that life ceases once consequence is encountered. He has created a Garden of Eden in his delightful films of the delicate blooming of relationships, but in ‘La femme de l'aviateur' he has pre-figured the inevitable temporal fall of this first waking dream of those young creatures who early stretch in the sun's first, kindly, rays, in fields that seem made especially for their innocent sport.The aviator's woman is like the rainbow's trajectory: The occasion of charming speculations, which can only be pursued, but never satisfied. Don't be misled by Rohmer's ‘documentary style.' He is a poet, not a realist. Or rather, perhaps, he is the documentarist of the evanescent, the ephemeral – like the green flash of sunset in his ‘Le rayon vert.'Perhaps this director expresses that very French nostalgia for the ideal aristocratic society of Romance – an impossible political Eden, therefore? And a somewhat guilty pleasure, on the evidence of. ‘La femme de l'aviateur.' Yet what sensual pleasure is there but eventually leaves us sadder than we were?Like that annual holiday which we dream of all the rest of the year, and which figure prominently in Rohmer's films, or like that hoped-for holiday romance undefiled by the unromantic intrusions of the daily grind, we are glad to be indulged by the prospect of escape, even though we know perfectly well that it will all come back to earth again with more or less of an unpleasant bump. Unusually for Rohmer, in this instance we are made very conscious of the disappointing nature of everyday reality during the course of the film. This atypicality, wonderfully, rather strengthens the artistic integrity and value of what the director wishes to do in the rest of his oeuvre. Maybe nostalgia for our lost Edens is, after all, sufficiently distinct from a defective grasp of reality to prevent our losing our heads...?