Just as the narrator is in pursuit of a woman who, momentarily, seems to elude him, events bring him in contact with another. And, regardless of the charm and persuasion of the second, he will reject her in favour of the first, even when he is not yet assured of her possession. Thus, Eric Rohmer defines the recurred theme of his filmed contes moraux….

Rohmer's aim is less to creiterary cinema than to enrich cinema with the techniques of literature, which accounts for the imprecise literary aura of his films. (p. 6)

[Le Signe du Lion] captures the intense physicality of a time and a place: Paris in the month of August, deserted by the natives and overrun by the tourists; the cosmopolitan anomie of the Left Bank, the sudden gust of desolation as night falls; but also, a feeling for bonds made and broken over a bottle of cheap red wine on a sunny quai.

There is hardly any feeling of regression in the hero's shifting fortune. Instead, the film suggests that the man succumbs less to the force of circumstance than to the ever-present lure of Bohemianism that Paris traditionally represents to the outsider, so that Wesselrin's six weeks in hell become as well the last summer in every man's youth. In documenting the passage from artist to mountebank, Rohmer builds a limpidly linear film, the ends of the story-line stretching outside the running time of the picture, almost beyond the director's control. Again … we have simply wandered into the characters' world, walked a short way together and taken our leave as they go on to live another moment of their lives….

[Rohmer stated why he filmed his contes moraux:] 'I wanted to portray in film what seemed most alien to the medium, to express feelings buried deep in our consciousness. That's why they have to be told in the first person singular and why there has to be a commentary. The protagonist discusses himself and judges his actions. I film the process.' (p. 7)

[Of La Collectionneuse, he said:] 'The most fascinating aspect of the three characters is their argot de caste [individual way of speaking]. There were some allusions in Daniel's dialogue, for instance, that are still incomprehensible to me. It was indispensable for the picture that the actors collaborate in the mise en scène: I wanted very complex characters, not too black, not too white, impossible to define in a few words. Although they all belong more or less to the same generation, there are gaps of milieux, of sensibility. Each one had to have its own vérité.'…

La Collectionneuse becomes the intimate journal of a modern dandy with the soul of a Jansenist, the dilemma of a man wary of instinctual commitment and action (even in love), the portrayal of an artificial sensibility caught between emotion felt and emotion literalised….

Adrien's flight from Haydée … is not to be interpreted, as Rohmer's more virulent detractors have done, as a refusal of passion or an apology for impotence and non-action. In reality, it is the refusal of love as imposed by a time and place: summer and the isolation of the villa in La Collectionneuse…. Other than sacrificing passion to principle, Adrien is also renouncing 'love from idleness' … for 'love from conviction', which brings Rohmer to the core of his theme, the problem of choice. (p. 8)

[All] four characters in [Ma Nuit Chez Maud] come fully equipped with religious/ideological principles. (Even Maud, a freethinker in a family of masonic aristocracy, wears her irreligiosity like a veil.) That's why the previous film lacks the gravity of the latter; why Maud had to be in black and white; why the characters, and not only the hero/narrator, have to bare their feelings one to another.

As usual in a Rohmer film, the opinions expressed by the characters engage the characters and them alone…. Their articulateness reduces narration to a minimum…. As every choice carries an implicit loss, Maud is made to appear the superior woman: she's generous, witty, passionate and … her erotic glow seems to light up Clermont-Ferrand in the dark of winter. She is not, however, a woman to be confined by the hero's moral limits. She loves well but not too wisely, and the epilogue finds her at sentimental loose ends once again. (pp. 8-9)

[Rohmer reaches back to the very source of moral conviction;] in his own measured, convincing manner, he talks to us about the joy and sorrow, the heartbreak and the triumph of l'amour sage. (p. 9)