by André Aciman
But perhaps what stirred me in the scene of the two men speaking about luck was something far simpler than their discussion about luck: the intensity of their conversation reminded me that there were still places on this planet where similar conversations in the most polished French are not unusual and that people still spoke this way in the cafés of France. I was suddenly homesick for a place that wasn’t even my home but that could have been, longing to hear French spoken on the streets of Manhattan, all the while sensing that, given the choice, I’d never want to leave Manhattan to move to France.
* * *
So here are the two men: I am here, says one, and you are there, says the other, and between us there’s time, space, and a strange design, which, to some, is no design at all but, to us, is proof we’re on to something whose meaning nevertheless eludes us.
It was the search for and the possible discovery of an undisclosed design in their lives that suddenly enchanted me, because everything in Rohmer is about design, which is another way of saying that everything is ultimately about form. Form is the imposition of design. In the absence of God, in the absence of identity, in the absence of love, even, is design—perhaps even the illusion of design.
The world teems with coincidences. Chance meetings, chance sightings, chance insights—these occur all the time. In fact, this is all there is: chance. In Rohmer, however, there is an algorithm to chance—or at least the search for such an algorithm—just as there might be a logic to happenstance. And this logic is not to be found outside the film, nor even in the film. It is the film itself. Form is the algorithm. Form, like art, is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Form is both the search for and the discovery of design.
Accidents happen in the lives of Rohmer’s characters; they do so with a frequency that is nothing short of uncanny, and no less so than, say, in a paltry, nineteenth-century Realist novel whose author has run out of tricks and relies on deus-ex-machina encounters to help move the plot along. But in Rohmer’s world chance events are not without meaning; they are the external manifestation of an inner logic, which sometimes—sometimes—tips its cards. Form is how we investigate, discover, and, however briefly, firm up this logic before it turns into a mirage and gives us the slip again. Chance events may seem totally capricious, but this is only because we judge life according to a logic that is sequential. There is, however, another logic, though it is not logical. The workings of what we call chance events, exactly like the thought processes of Rohmer’s highly insightful yet frequently deluded characters, are counterintuitive and willfully paradoxical. The world is paradoxically constructed; the psyche is governed by desires that couldn’t be more paradoxical. To “read” life, one stands a better chance of understanding the world—and the seventeenth-century French moralists had figured this out—by reading it counterintuitively; i.e., antithetically. Pascal called this renversement perpétuel, perpetual reversal. But Pascal was a logician. And what he meant most likely was symmetrical reversal. A coincidence, after all, is nothing more than the suggestion of symmetry, of design, an elusive apprehension of meaning. The love of design is the love of God transposed to aesthetics. Symmetry is how we manufacture the illusion, the impression, the glint of meaning in our otherwise meaningless and chaotic lives. Irony itself is nothing more than the design our perceptions impose on things that our intellect already knows have no design whatsoever. This is the essence of all art. Chaos stylized.
The plot of My Night at Maud’s screams symmetrical reversal. Jean-Louis has his eyes on the blond Françoise, a seemingly virtuous churchgoer he’s already decided he’ll marry without ever having spoken to her once. Meanwhile, he meets Maud, the brunette, a typical temptress who wishes to sleep with him but whom he manages to resist. However, the morning after leaving Maud’s apartment, Jean-Louis spots Françoise, walks up to her as she is parking her bike, and, mustering his courage, does something he claims he’s never done before with a stranger on the street: he speaks to her. As with Maud, he will end up sleeping under Françoise’s roof, but not with her. He does indeed marry Françoise, only to discover, completely by chance, when he and Françoise run into Maud at a beach five years later, that his wife had been the mistress of none other than Maud’s husband. In fact, Françoise may be the reason behind Maud’s divorce.
At the beach, Jean-Louis was about to confide to his wife that on the morning he first spoke to her, he had just left Maud’s apartment. But before attempting to tell her this, he realizes in a flash of insight that what seemed to disturb Françoise at that very moment on the beach was not what she might finally discover about her husband and Maud. It was something else—and the symmetrical reversal and double remove here couldn’t be more stylized. He looks at his wife and realizes that she was at this very instant inferring what he himself was just inferring about her. Nothing is ever stated in the film, but the inferences are clear enough. Françoise and Maud had slept with the same man, and that man was Maud’s husband. In life, their pairing was simply reversed; in art, it was corrected.
The totally adventitious nature of this traffic of insights in multiple removes between husband and wife at the beach says that truth is never arrived at methodically; it is only intercepted, stolen, and therefore always unstable and subject to error or revision. An insight into something could always be right or wrong—we know this. But an insight into an insight is always crafted and thus bears the imprint of form. In Rohmer we are in a world where consciousness, like desire, like chance, like thinking, like conversation, is always conscious of itself, and therefore always stylized.
* * *
Sitting in the café at the beginning of the film, these two friends, like almost all characters in Rohmer’s films, derive a peculiar, self-conscious thrill in finding themselves eagerly discussing the very thing that is right that minute happening to them. Is there a meaning to our meeting, or is it just luck? Since there is no way to answer such a question, one has to wager—Pascal again—that there must be a meaning behind coincidence, if not in conventional, ordinary life, then at least in the conventions of art—in film, for example. How dear are those moments when we suddenly perceive in a series of accidents something like an omniscient intelligence deploying—or, as Proust likes to say, organizing—one by one, the events of our lives, so that it is not just their alignment that strikes us but their resonance, which is the specter of meaning. What can be better than to espy in real, day-to-day, humdrum, desultory existence the light touch of the great artificer himself framing our lives according to the covenants of art? Happens once or twice in a lifetime; these occasions are called miracles.
But the discovery that form is a way of attributing meaning to coincidence is sidelined by another discovery: namely, that this ability to move in multiple removes—to discuss the act of discussing—is itself meaningful and becomes explosive when transposed to the boudoir, because it is already obliquely erotic. And this is exactly what happens about twenty minutes later between Jean-Louis and Maud. This kind of candor and this kind of self-conscious thinking and lifting of layers could only end up in a bedroom. It isn’t even candor, though it bears all the inflections of candor: at once very frank and intimate, spoken with the confiding grace with which lovers open up to each other in bed, all the while maintaining a guarded distance. For all we know, they might as well be flirting. In every truth lies the inscription of whimsy and artifice, the intrusions of craft in our most spontaneous, halting avowals. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies…”: Emily Dickinson. I had never seen things this way. Nor had I ever spoken about desire while I was prey to it.
I missed talking the way Maud and Jean-Louis spoke, though I’d never spoken to anyone in that manner. I envied Jean-Louis and Maud’s insights, their wisdom, their misled smugness, their fearless impulse to analyze and overanalyze each nuance of desire and discomfort, then turn around and confide it right away to the very person who was stirring that vague sense of desire and discomfort. It would
never have occurred to them that their well-wrought avowals, rather than clear the path for passion, might in the end choke its fire and stand in its way. Perhaps their words had come too soon and gone too far, while the body, like a cramped, self-conscious straggler, was a cheated extra who’d forgotten his lines.
And yet, all that they were doing was making conversation during embarrassing spells of silence. Speech itself had given birth to surrogate pleasures. It did not dispel passion or put it on hold; it simply allowed it to talk, to think. In this instance, and perhaps only in this instance, can it be said that desire is a civilizing agent.
But as if to undo all these layers of conversation and subterfuge, at some point Maud will look at Jean-Louis and sum up his entire behavior that night with one word: “Idiot.”
* * *
On Christmas night, Vidal brings along Jean-Louis to Maud’s apartment for dinner. The two meet for the first time. They discuss Pascal. The conversation is at once light and serious, and both Maud and Vidal rib Jean-Louis about his self-righteous adherence to Catholicism. Then Maud puts on a T-shirt and gets under the covers of her bed in the living room, fully enjoying the presence of both men in her salon, aware that she is replicating the ritual practiced among the seventeenth-century précieuses. Meanwhile, the evening is drawing to a close, and Vidal has to leave. Jean-Louis also says it is time for him to leave, but because of the snow he is encouraged to spend the night at Maud’s. The pious Catholic in him is genuinely ill at ease, as he suspects that Maud may have designs on him, which is when Maud tells him he should rest easy and sleep in the other room if he wishes. Soon after Vidal leaves, Jean-Louis does say he’d like to retire and asks where that other room is, and he is summarily informed that there is no “other room.” In fact, Maud adds in her typically taunting, lambent, mischievous manner, Vidal knew very well there was no “other room” in her home when he’d heard her offer it to Jean-Louis—which explains Vidal’s grumpy and hasty exit. The woman who will, in fact, offer him another room in her empty dormitory will be not Maud but his wife-to-be, Françoise.
Stuck together and yet clearly ill at ease, Maud and Jean-Louis continue to talk. While she is under the covers, he leans over and sits on her bed, fully clothed in his double-breasted gray flannel suit and, in a moment of silence that is as uncomfortable to Maud as it is to the spectator, stares intensely at her, while she returns his gaze, the two of them at a loss for words and yet already unburdening themselves to each other. She tells him of her life; of her ex-husband, who had been unfaithful; of her lover who died in a car crash; of her terrible luck with men. He paints a broad picture of love affairs in the past, but far more cagily. They discuss his conversion to Catholicism, his avoidance of light sexual affairs, his desire, as she sees it, to marry a blond woman, since, in her prescient view, all pious Catholic women are necessarily blondes. Then, as they stare at each other, Maud, in an unguarded moment, says, “It’s been ages since I’ve spoken like this to anyone. I like it.”
Their conversation skims “philosophy in the boudoir,” but it is neither armchair psychology nor even seduction. It is, however, supremely analytical and almost uncomfortably intimate and penetrating. Analysis and seduction, like insight and chance, or chaos and design, are braided together and can no longer be told apart. What Pascal called ésprit de finesse and La Rochefoucauld pénétration lies at the heart of Rohmer’s insights into that skittish and capricious ganglion called the human psyche.
If Rohmer has frequently been “accused” of being literary, it is not just because his screenplays are extraordinarily well written; it is because he always wagers that the key to the psyche, like the key to every accident in our lives, can be found only in fiction, and this because fiction and, more broadly, art are the only mechanisms available with which to capture, however tentatively, the demon of design. There was always going to be a design, and if there wasn’t a design, then the very act of searching for a design in that highly crafted, paradoxical way was already a way of wagering that life itself is a highly crafted and stylized affair. The thought that there may be nothing instead of something is aesthetically unacceptable.
* * *
In the makeshift “boudoir” of Maud’s bedroom, Jean-Louis and Maud are analytical in a situation that is unbearably intimate and in which most people would much rather wish their senses might take over. But analysis is not allowed to slip into hasty sensuality. Here the mild gêne and the occasional lapses into total silence between the two are so intense and so disarming—one is tempted to say denuding—that they, more, even, than the bed itself, keep prodding at the hovering sensuality of the moment.
The senses cannot deflect analysis; they become analytical. Passion in this instance, as is more often the case than people admit, is not really the end, but the cover, the way out, the pretext; physical contact often buries the tension between two individuals who cannot stand either tacit ambiguity or the rising awkwardness between them. In some cases, it is speech that is spontaneous, not passion; speech undresses us; passion can be a cloaking device. This reversal, which would become the hallmark of so many of Rohmer’s films, is not just using talk to deflect or defer sex. It is, rather, a desire to find the sort of intimacy that sex, allegedly the most intimate act between two individuals, hastily cheats us of by sidestepping intimacy altogether. In Rohmer’s world, passion is nothing more than a desired blindfold that allows us to work around the unbearable moment when we are forced to disclose who and what we really are.
* * *
While watching the film and feeling the growing discomfort of the two would-be lovers stuck in the same bedroom, I began to think of the girl I’d taken to Central Park a year earlier one night and made out with, right by Bethesda Fountain. How suddenly it had all happened: her call, going to the Paris Cinema on Fifty-Eighth Street, getting a bite to eat in some unnamed place, then heading through the park until we’d reached Seventy-Second Street. All of it so unplanned, as if life itself had taken things into its own hands and told me not to intrude, don’t even think of meddling, everything was taken care of. Two policemen walked up to us and told us that the park was closed to lovers. There was a snigger in their voices, while I thought to myself, So we’re lovers now—fancy that! We joked with the officers until we’d walked out of the Women’s Gate on West Seventy-Second and then headed uptown on what was once known as the CC train to Washington Heights. When we reached her home, she asked me to come upstairs. So I hadn’t misread the signals at all that evening. She put some water to boil to make instant coffee, and we began to kiss on the sofa, then on the rug, where months earlier we’d had our long conversation about the cue I’d missed the year before. We kept speaking about that until, during a pause in our conversation, she told me that her mother might wake up in the room right next to the living room. Not to worry, I said, we weren’t making noise. Well, perhaps you should start heading home, she said, it was getting late. So she’d changed her mind, I thought on my way to the subway station that night. Only then did it hit me: I had hesitated. I had wanted to resolve the mystery of the afternoon when she’d taken off her clothes in front of me, I had wanted to talk about that and square it away, to speak not just freely but intelligently about that day or about the night when we’d first met at a party I had already decided not to attend; I had wanted so many things that were obviously not scripted for that night. Without knowing it yet, what I’d wanted was a Rohmerian moment—that magical span when a man and a woman, unwilling to rush to where both know they are unavoidably headed, heed another impulse, which is to dissect their chance encounter, to examine how they got to where they are, and to unlock the logic of how desire and fate are indissolubly fused, and, having thought about these things, to turn around and confide them right away to each other, which is when they’ll also disclose their hopes and their oblique maneuvers, only to be told that these hardly went unnoticed by the other. I wanted that span of time, that durée. It wasn’t courage I wanted; what I wanted was court
ship. I wanted more.
It took no time while I was still viewing the film to realize that I was borrowing Rohmer’s fictions on-screen and projecting them retroactively onto my own failed love affair with the girl from Washington Heights. I was replaying my life in the key of Rohmer—misreading my life, and certainly misreading Rohmer, but in both cases finding something eloquent and arresting in the transposition. Our conversation on her mother’s sofa, my hand under her clothes, her story about an ex who wasn’t doing it for her but wasn’t disappearing fast enough, and suddenly the kettle whistling just when I was about to tell her that I’d always hoped she’d call me someday—we might as well have been speaking French and living in the black-and-white world of the New Wave years.
But perhaps what was also happening to me in the theater could as easily be reversed: it was not I who was casting a retrospective glance on that night in Washington Heights; it was Rohmer. He had borrowed my night for an hour or so, pared down its roughness, and trimmed it of all psychobabble, given our scene a rhythm, an intelligence, a design, and then projected it onto the screen while promising to return it to me after the show, though slightly altered, so that I’d have my life back but seen from the other side—not as it was, nor as it wasn’t, but as I’d always imagined it should be, the idea of my life. The idea of my life in France. My life as a French movie. My life symmetrically reversed. My life scaled down and cleansed of all chaff and all interference till all that was left was its irrealis watermark on a blank sheet of paper on which was written a might-have-been life that hadn’t really happened but wasn’t unreal for not happening and might still happen, though I feared it never would. I couldn’t have felt more rudderless—or more liberated.