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AT A PRESS screening of the 1992 French film La Discrete, I noticed the young man next to me furiously scribbling notes and taking audible pleasure in the story. I thought, this twentysomething critic probably doesn't realize what a lazy rip this is of Claire's Knee. Then it hit me: How could he know? He probably wasn't even born when Claire; Knee came out in 1971, confirming the international impression Eric Rohmer had first made with My Night at Maud's the year before.
Gen-X Crit wasn't alone in his mistake. Many who were around at the time mistook Rohmer's art, and many still do. Praising Rendezvous in Paris, Time Out-London misspoke: "Eric Rohmer still makes a young man's movie." But nothing could be further from the truth. Although Rendezvous features young actors in the sun-dazzled contemporary settings Rohmer favors, each of the film's three tales expresses an older man's seriousness and-something only recently apparent in Rohmer's work-a certain timelessness.
"Mother and Child 1907," the third story in Rendezvous in Paris, sums up Rohmer's thirty-year interest in romantic philosophy with a simple plot but stronger dramatic effect. The climactic story-modern, carnal, a little plaintive-provides a better view of his aesthetic. A vain, deceitful hound-dog artist (Michael Kraft), who impulsively abandons one date to pick up a new woman he sees at a museum, embodies the failings and weaknesses Rohmer himself must rue as a man (and a worldfamous filmmaker) alert to a variety of sexual attractions-and guilt-ridden about them. In "Mother and Child 1907," named after a Picasso canvas that piques Kraft's artistic and sexual ego, Rohmer pursues his usual diffident protagonist, winding up with a drama that illuminates, after all these years and many ethical misadventures, the spiritual struggle behind his tales of lust and intellectualism.
Rohmer followers may find "Mother and Child 1907" the finest of his films because its narrative efficiency no longer feels constrained; one can view his entire oeuvre as a journey toward just this kind of animated, numinous vision. The ineffable sneaks up on the viewer, lending tantalizing suspense to the willful wrong turns and feigned distance between Kraft and his chastising new love object (Benedicte Loyen). Rohmer, the pedantic, novelistic filmmaker and intransigent ascetic, has produced an uninhibited, fully...