Eric Rohmer's Contes Moraux examine the withering away of feeling and genuine sentiment in the life of contemporary man. People for Rohmer subvert their intellects, using ideas as substitutes for feelings, and often to deny them. Thus the intellect works against man's deepest interests and desires, hiding from him his true self as well as the means by which he could satisfy the needs of that self. (p. 147)

Rohmer's heroes are all of a distinct moral type. Although Jean-Louis of My Night At Maud's, an ascetic Catholic, seems very different from the ebullient Jerome of Claire's Knee and the self-centered pleasure-loving Adrien of Collectionneuse, the three are very similar. Each represses spontaneous emotion preferring to live by calculation. Each is incapable of a relationship with a woman who is his equal because he is too self-centered to respond freely to the differentness of another. Moreover, the three have in common the fear of emotional risk and of having their true feelings "found out," as much by themselves as by others. In each film the hero feels a great need for a permanent love relationship….

Jean-Louis of My Night at Maud's … sets out to find a woman who will complement his Catholic beliefs as well as his mundane, socially approved aesthetic standards…. His character emerges only in the course of the debate he has with his old Marxist friend, Vidal, over the meaning of Pascal. Having always subordinated body to mind, Jean-Louis expresses himself best in the world of abstractions. These conversations are the perfect objective correlative for a character whose life is so little oriented toward the satisfaction of primary, physical needs.

The cold Jean-Louis and the warm Vidal each find their own Pascal. (p. 148)

Rohmer is much more sympathetic to Vidal, although he is destined to be the loser, because Vidal sees in Pascal the notion that man is not man unless he is willing to take risks, for example, to commit himself to an uncertain if great end (Marxism or the love of Maud), even if he has only small chance of success. (p. 149)

Pascal's sense that "we do not possess true goodness" caused him to argue for ambiguity in the meaning man gives to his acts in the world. But Jean-Louis is too insensitive to recognize the essential ambivalence of human experience. Instead, fearing it, he imposes a rigid code upon himself by which he will live at all costs: that "love is eternal," that "self-respect" would make him love his wife forever, and that divorce for him would be impossible. He justifies his fear of risks with abstract principles which have nothing to do with his true desires. Hiding behind these ideas, he loses contact with what he feels. (pp. 149-50)

[Jerome of Claire's Knee] is, like Jean-Louis, totally self-absorbed, imperceptive of the feelings of others. Revealingly, at the end of the film he cannot remember the man whom his friend Aurora brought to visit him and whom she is now marrying. Jerome sees life only in terms of his image of himself. The frescoes of Don Quixote seated blindfolded on a wooden horse, believing he is flying, adorn Jerome's house and are his visual equivalent. Like Don Quixote and like Jean-Louis, Jerome believes he is actively choosing his destiny. In reality, these are timid men who become infatuated with the least intellectually threatening women—those incapable of offering them challenge. (pp. 150-51)

Rohmer's settings are visual manifestations of his heroes' personalities: the carefree life at St. Tropez defines the emptiness of Adrien whose sole object in life as we see him is "to do nothing well." (p. 151)

In Claire's Knee the setting too provides a judgment on the empty, idle existence of the haute-bourgeoisie personified by Jerome…. They reflect Jerome's boredom, and as in the case of Adrien, the superficiality of his emotions. (pp. 151-52)

The icy winter in the dreary French province of Clermont is a perfect analogue to the strained, closemouthed Jean-Louis [of My Night at Maud's]. The omnipresent snow and ice reflect his absence of feeling, his tendency toward jesuitical abstraction and the narrowness of his Catholicism. (p. 152)

In My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee the cultural ideal, the blonde, coy, mindless coquette is placed beside an intellectual, witty woman, capable of humor and irony, but unappealing to the hero for her very independence and unique sense of self.

In My Night at Maud's Rohmer places before us two opposites: Maud and Françoise, the dark and the light. Maud is a woman of ideas. Knowing the ambiguities of life, she agrees with Pascal on the questionable value of marriage…. Like life, Maud is imperfect…. The images associated with Maud are meant to express the liberation of emotion whereas those with Françoise bespeak frigidity, duplicity, and the view that life is a game to be played with lies and cunning. (pp. 152-53)

Where Maud's every gesture expressed openness, Françoise's stifling of feeling creates barriers….

[It] is inconceivable that with her stinginess of emotion [Françoise] should be capable of caring for others. (p. 153)

[However,] Maud, a loser at the end in a new marriage which "is not going well" is perhaps far from a moral paragon…. [She] loses both [Jean-Louis and Vidal] because her wager fails and because she chooses, unwisely, the men least likely to satisfy her needs. But Rohmer leaves little doubt that the Mauds of the world possessing imagination, spontaneity, a zest of life, are infinitely more desirable than the passive, dull Françoises, who lack culture, wit, and all charm.

Rohmer creates a similar opposition of types in the less intellectually realized Claire's Knee and La Collectionneuse. (p. 154)

Haydée is made the figure both desirable in a traditional way and the one representing risk and the wager. Sensing that Adrien will pervert his interest in her to deny all feeling, she wisely shows no awareness of him…. She despises his self-righteous and unfounded belief that in some mysterious way he is "better" than she.

More interesting are the trio of women of Claire's Knee, in which Rohmer breaks down the figure of Haydée into three distinct women….

Claire is callow and narcissistic. A far more subtle woman is her sixteen-year-old half-sister, Laura, who unlike the sensuous Claire, has already felt the pangs of real love and who alone senses that Jerome's feeling for Lucinde is friendship, not love. Jerome argues that friendship and love are the same, thus justifying a discomforting recognition that he lacks all passion for his future bride. It is Laura who is right about him because, capable of spontaneous feeling, unlike Jerome, she knows that the experience of love affects one "totally," that one cannot be "happy" when in love.

Completing the trio is the older woman, Aurora, who looks on Jerome with irony…. Aurora presents, like Maud, a self-sufficient exterior, claiming that "solitude satisfies me. I enjoy it;" by the end of the film she belies her contention by marrying. As Aurora herself admitted earlier, speaking of Jerome, but also inadvertently about herself, "everyone has a blindfold."… Aurora needs the security of a man's presence, like Maud, who felt compelled to marry a second time, although intellectually she questioned the value of marriage as an institution.

Jean-Louis chooses Françoise, unconsciously obsessed with finding in woman an image of himself. (pp. 154-55)

Probability makes it equally possible for Jean-Louis to have chosen either Maud or Françoise. In Jean-Louis's case "chance" merely provides the opportunity for him to express his preconceived choice. (p. 158)

If Jean-Louis fights off Maud, Adrien of Collectionneuse cannot allow himself to yield to his desire for Haydée, as if pursuit of this careless female would undermine the idea he has of himself as a serious person whose life is carefully ordered and under his control. The "order" he seeks is antithetical to the spontaneous life. He fittingly sets for his vacation the goal of doing nothing well because what creates "meaning" for Adrien is the exercise of will alone where instinct can be subsumed by a preconceived notion….

Like Jean-Louis of Maud, Adrien does not know what he wants. He has become too alienated from his feelings (which conflict with his self-image) even to recognize them. He returns to his mistress in London not out of choice, but to fill the void left by the gratifying self-deception that the sensuous Haydée really longed only for him. But he has felt nothing for either of the women in his life….

The "ideas" of Adrien, his feeling that his life is his profession, are unrooted in purpose; they are empty of utility or commitment which would entail the risk of failure. (p. 160)

Seeing through Daniel and Adrien as poseurs, Haydée enjoys making them act contrary to their pretensions, exposing them as hypocrites. Fearing their essential "ugliness," the theme introduced in the prologue to the film, Adrien and Daniel assert that they are exceptional. Haydée reverses the roles, claiming that it is they who are easy and not she…. In reality, it is [Adrien] who is the predator, risking nothing in his relationships because his feelings are never involved.

Jerome in Claire's Knee risks nothing because he chooses as the object of his infatuation Claire herself, and neither Laura nor Aurora. In this film even more clearly than the others the ideas by which a man lives and defines himself are shown to be a mere facade, substituting for rather than expressing his innermost feelings.

Even when he acknowledges his desire for Claire, Jerome believes that he can retain command over his emotions with his intellect. (p. 161)

Jerome thus becomes a manipulator of feelings….

Jerome transforms the reality of the little interlude with Claire into an intellectual construct, a fantasy…. Where emotions are inadequate, words can be marshalled to add the intrinsic importance the emotions lack. Jerome has learned nothing about himself from the revelation that he is indeed susceptible to "little girls," and the measure of his delusion is his continuing belief that he has done Claire "some good," having freed her from Gilles…. The verbal ruse Jerome has employed to avoid facing the meaning of his acts and choices is rendered ludicrous. Nothing changes except the weather: the men flee from women who are their intellectual equals, and the women, Maud in particular, from men who could accept the richness of response they have to offer.

Why men have become this way, burying their feelings, deceiving themselves with chimerical ideas, is the implied question buried in Rohmer's films. He leaves it unanswered. Despite the emphasis of his films on the process of conceptualization, how man hides behind intellectual constructs, his films are empty of prescription. They depend upon the visual—how man acts in the context of his world, and upon the verbal—how men reveal themselves in their relationships. There is no hint in Rohmer's moral tales of a world where men are fulfilled, where sexual relations are placed in the context of a useful, satisfying life. Jean-Louis, Jerome and Adrien have nothing to live for, neither values nor goals behind the narrow pursuit of self-interest.

The films judge and expose these men, but point to no path by which they might transcend their malaise. This weakens Claire's Knee and La Collectionneuse considerably. It makes of them art works in miniature, small statements. My Night At Maud's overcomes this weakness with its perspective of the wager as an alternative to the fear of "chance" and its sanctioning beyond the limited point of view of its hero Jean-Louis, the risking despite all odds of what is decidedly uncharacteristic of one's conscious self and motives. None of Rohmer's characters, men or women, find what they are looking for from life. Those who live most wisely are those willing to renounce absolutes and to pursue the image of their desire. If the wager fails, the life may yet have been meaningfully lived. (pp. 162-64)

In Chloe In The Afternoon Rohmer displays fatigue with the theme of a man in love with one woman but nearly successful in seducing (or being seduced by) another, an exhaustion under the weight of this mode of moral satire. Rohmer's own boredom reveals itself in his choice for the first time of a Parisian setting redolent of the ennui of afternoons spent at cafes and department stores. (pp. 164-65)

[Despite] considerable satire of the values and behavior of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois mode is affirmed [in Chloe]. Beside the disordered life of Chloe herself, moving in chaos and dirt from one dingy flat to another, Frédéric's sweet, sanitary existence with his wife Hélène signifies relief and a more viable way of living. (p. 165)

That the hero fails to be seduced for the first time in the Contes Moraux is a victory rather than a failure. For Frédéric the aborted affair with Chloe is not seen as a test exposing his poverty of imagination…. Rather, it is depicted as a narrow escape from intemperate yielding to an altogether undesirable temptation…. [It is] a love of safety in which the duality between bourgeois desire for certainties and the impulse to sensuality and adventure sinks beneath the burden of the habitual.

The difficulty with Chloe In The Afternoon is that Rohmer overly approves Frédéric's collapse into routine and a life without surprise…. Rohmer renders [Chloe] so spiritually unattractive precisely to elevate Frédéric's diminished life with Hélène and their two babies. (pp. 165-66)

Yet Rohmer relentlessly satirizes the bourgeois self-deceptions and hypocrisies of Frédéric. Like Rohmer's other male characters, he is a man who lives in his head…. In describing Frédéric's way of life, Rohmer's satire is sharp and to the point. He reveals that these twists to Frédéric's character serve only to enclose him more completely within his identity as a bourgeois, a man incapable of living by his impulses and deeper potential. In the end, despite afternoon fantasies of the Parisian girls he ogled on the streets, Frédéric cannot unite dream with reality. (p. 166)

Rohmer's wavering weakens the film because the conception, like the emotion, is trite. He wishes to ridicule the boyish, self-satisfied Frédéric, while at the same time the film moves toward a sense that an affair with Chloe … will yield pointless trouble rather than pleasure or discovery. Rohmer comes to the affirmation of a paltry marriage and reduces all the satire preceding it to a decorative embellishment not unlike Frédéric himself. (p. 167)

By confounding the superficiality of the bourgeois with the poignancy of passing youth, Rohmer softens and sentimentalizes both his larger theme and its moral resonance.

Because he presents it as undesirable that Frédéric do anything about his fantasies, the film is more static and slow-moving than the earlier Contes Moraux. Like the others, its interest lies in Rohmer's repeated exposure of the hero's lack of self-knowledge….

No more than Frédéric is [Chloe] capable of spontaneous feeling. She says that it is important to her to be "free," but her freedom amounts to Don Juanism, vulgar, obvious and unenjoyed. Her distaste for the men she pursues to reject bespeaks an essential dislike of the heterosexual experience. Although she accuses Frédéric of being "bourgeois," she is as bourgeois as he. (p. 168)

The pessimism of this finale to the Contes Moraux flows from Rohmer's implied conclusion that none of us are capable of transcending ourselves. We have all lost the freedom to respond to the potential of the moment without dragging along the weight of the past. In the end, lapsing from the demands of his own theme, Rohmer decides that to be so vulnerable and committed to the sensual offerings of life is less desirable after all. Even a marriage diminished by our incapacity to be satisfied is better than the limbo of the transitory.

Rohmer's film is also weakened because no one depicted is capable of authenticity or an alternative vision. In the earlier films it was the free woman, but in Chloe freedom is reduced to license. (p. 171)

Chloe's role in the film is as some external, malevolent, Iago-like spirit, destined to play on Frédéric's susceptibilities, if only perversely to show she can ruin his life. She functions as well as Frédéric's unconscious impulse surfacing and destroying his pretension of being debonair and in control….

Women too long at loose ends finally become demonic in Rohmer, their impulses perverse, their desires greedy, possessive and sadistic. (p. 174)

Toward the end of the film, primarily through the editing, Rohmer shows that while Frédéric seeks her as an answer, in reality Chloe has little to offer. At this point in the film the distance is most pronounced between Rohmer and his character….

It is a loyalty that Rohmer has implicitly, if belatedly, affirmed in this film, suggesting that Pascal aside, life offers us little better. It is a despairing resolution and an intellectual defeat, reflected in the aesthetic failure of Chloe In The Afternoon. Rohmer satirizes Frédéric as he weakly leaves the water running in Chloe's bathroom and rushes down the stairs, an image of his sexual infantilism and lack of emotional command. Frédéric is finally sensible in fleeing home to Hélène, but for the wrong reasons. (p. 176)

To the end, Frédéric remains unaware of his own transparency; his "clever" lies have been frequently and easily exposed…. Thus even [the reunion of Frédéric and Hélène] seems as hollow as their marriage has been throughout the film.

In the last shot of the film Rohmer focusses on the accoutrements of bourgeois existence rather than on his characters: a table, a lamp and the suburban landscape stretching forth from their open window. These, Rohmer suggests, offer the only redeeming refuge we know from the temptations of the dirty Paris streets. The lack of excitement is made up for by order and tranquillity. (p. 177)

The game (it seems it was only a game after all) must ultimately tire us. It is even as if in the earlier [contes moraux] we were seduced by Rohmer into aspiring to and expecting more. What counts, Rohmer concludes, is what we have come to need, since we are members of the bourgeoisie all—stability, permanence and resignation to what we have been rather than commitment to what we might be. (p. 178)

Joan Mellen, "The Moral Psychology of Rohmer's Tales," in her Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (copyright 1973, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Horizon Press, New York), Horizon, 1973, pp. 147-78.