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Fresh faces, eternal themes make Rohmer's work timeless
EW YORK Eric Rohmer is being honored at this year's Venice Intl. Film N Festival for his lifetime achievement in the cinema. For some of us cinephiles, this gesture of formal recognition is eminently well deserved for an 81-year-old director with a spark-ling career that spans more than a half-century.
"Sparkling" at least partly because of Rohmer's remarkably persistent preoccupation with youthful subjects, that is to say with the elective affinities of young women either as they confront competing males, or as they compete with other women for the same male. Despite the apparent repetitiousness of the narrative pattern, Rohmer's films have been consistently subtle, sophisticated and civilized entertainment.
There is in all of Rohmer's films also much talk, perhaps too much for some tastes. A detective played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's "Night Moves" (1975) complained that watching a Rohmer film was like watching paint dry. Rohmer himself quoted 12th-century writer Chretien de Troyes in a prescript to "Pauline at the Beach" (1983): "He who talks too much digs his own grave."
Hence the compulsive conversations in Rohmer's romances as often defeat the objectives of the speaker...