#Scurf 132: A Constellation of Quiet in Rohmer's 'Four Adventures'
An unlikely silence in Rohmer's 'Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle'
For centuries silence has held a profound pride of place in developing the emotional tone of movies. But seldom, if not never, in those of the French auteur Eric Rohmer. His movies revelled in capturing the sincerity of human conversation, going in that way behind the psyche of human condition by letting people talk for as many words per minute as he possibly could. This shifted slightly in his Four Adventures which is actually a kind of an oddball in his oeuvre, something else. In it exists an other silence creating blanks of what it is the character are actually not saying. In this essay, I write about that.
Read on and share with the readers in your life!
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, an episodic film about contrasting young women and their misadventures, was released in 1987. It was not part of Rohmer’s Comedies and Parables series, but its skilful portrayal of young women’s lives in the city sits well with the series. The film was more conspicuously comic, more overtly ethical, more pointed in its action than most of Rohmer’s contemporary works. Rife with paradoxes and ironic reversals, the film does away with any dogmas and dramas that dot his other works. The main “problem” in the film is expression, almost as a self-mocking joke about the famous literariness of his films. And this is what pulled me to it. In a sea of wordy, verbose Rohmer films, Four Adventures deals in silence. A character is chided for being too voluble, another relishes the absence of words. Almost as if undoing his previous chatty films Four Adventures even begins and ends with silence.
In the first of the four connected episodes in Four Adventures, “The Blue Hour” country lass, and aspiring artist Reinette treasures a particular kind of silence. She meets the mondain Mirabelle over a flat bicycle tyre and invites Mirabelle to her studio. They don’t know yet that they are about to forge a lasting, deep friendship. Seeing Reinette’s studio inside a forlorn building, Mirabelle is awed. Her expressive, abstract, erotically charged surrealist paintings move Mirabelle. Reinette invites Mirabelle to experience the magical “blue hour”, a period before sunrise when nature forestalls the sun making its ultimate “expression”.
Introducing the topic of silence in his film, Rohmer’s Reinette explains that she can express herself best through her art, especially the “silent” ways in which art so sublimely manifests itself. It is a completely different topic then that Reinette spends breathless long minutes blabbering on about the meaning of it all. She relishes it so much that she wakes her new friend Mirabelle just before dawn so they can both hear “the blue hour”. This is a stolen moment just before the onset of morning rush filling the day with its music. In its murmuration, the scene reveals itself as a needed pause, a mediation on the colour blue, lush to the senses. Merely a few seconds long, the moment is a brief, if poetic, silence that separates the spaces of night and day, darkness, and light. It is not a sound, but an elegiac, pocket of soft voicelessness, when, as Reinette says, the night birds have stopped singing and the day birds have not yet begun twittering.
That pocket of quiet held my attention as one of the shortest moments in cinema, dulling the noise of all that came before. The moment as a séance at the end of the world. The moment as a drink at the end of a tiring day. The moment as a constellation of mossy beauty, neglected and shorn. Watching the film on a December night, inside my musky quilt as the late-night quiet engulfed me, the moment had a feeling of immenseness to it. My Taco Bell order was on its way too, an unhurried rush enveloped me.
As if in pursuing that halt, Reinette was reaching out to touch something and being totally enmeshed in it. A possibility of a mizzle brushes past Mirabele, her new friend, as the moment breaks with the sound of a motorcar passing by. It breaks Reinette’s heart, as she cracks into a cry at being unable to enthral her new friend with a known pocket of pleasure. In that flash, the film also reveals as holding this light-hearted friendship at its heart.
The innate Rohmerness of Four Adventures lies in the sublime moment where Mirabele tries to capture the evanescence of that pre-dawn minute. It feels as necessary as beautiful to her. Even though the film is not a romance drama, the characters in this scene, in the little drama created by the austerity of the pre-dawn time filmed on 16mm, undergo heightened emotions when their spell is broken by the whirring engine of a motor car passing by.
In this Rohmer’s subtle commentary on the intrusion of capitalism on the daily lives of people was pronounced. Two girls couldn’t enjoy a peaceful moment even in the countryside without being disturbed by a smidgen of city chaos. The quiet of a cosmos unfurling like a soft, fading bruise, where this is a song in the stillness. The motor’s gushing and gurgling breaking their supposed reverie even before it sets in.
Shot on 16mm in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, this breezy work sees Rohmer’s “new wave” chops working in full effect. There is the shaky vérité camerawork and unending discussions about art and virtue, where we see Rohmer as the master of adult conversation.
Later, emboldened by their decision of living as roommates in Paris together, Mirabelle wakes up one morning, hunting for the quiet of the blue hour. Outside the scene is washed in midnight blue, reminiscent of winter nights and carries with itself a whiff of the scent of evergreen nature. A risk of dense fog hangs over the girls, as the trilling of insects recedes into the background, and a muffled quiet emerges. There is not a breath in the treetops around them, neither in the sky above. Only time passing by slowly, in eddies, currents, and ripples. Behind that cobalt, I imagined the skies as crisscrossed with contrails. Nothing happened for a few seconds as a creeping low cloud lingers over the wee hours. The sky and earth all equally blue, dancing like light and hope, as the sound of a diesel engine washes up.
Each night since having watched the film, when I turn the lights out in my ground floor house before going to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I think about the blue hour from Four Adventure. The view from my window is that of a car park with various tall, leafy trees. Peering through the window, as I think about the peace Reinette aimed to experience at the cerulean hour, the blurry darkness outside crowds around me, and feel myself embraced by a rumour in the leaves. It feels like the Amaltas trees outside are expectant, waiting to be awakened. The night lying in wait. I observe small branches in motion, the car park stained a deep convalescent blue by the night hour. The sky hangs slack as a creeping mist closes in on the late hour. That moment encapsulates for me how in this swarm of human hives we tend to find our own valves of peace, connection, and sublimation. The pleasure of city lives soothing beyond all explanation.
The Aegean moment from Four Adventures lends itself to ruminative meditations about life, and its tender, if mundane poetry. Falling into my lap at an odd time, as a new variant of the virus ravaged the world, the blue hour felt arctic, like an unearthed treasure from the early days of human existence. Among the many distinguished, deep, and quietly beguiling list of Rohmer’s films that I watched in the last two years, I remember some fondly, while also being able to recall absolutely nothing from some. Four Adventures is one that falls in both these categories. It shows the remarkable philosophical range of Rohmer’s characters. The blue hour suggests a quest for something more in the everyday. Going beyond the ritualistic mundane that azure suggests that Rohmer loved novelistic opportunities arising out of stories about free will.
The scene, though incomplete in its act, stands still, while the characters are confused, and expectant, waiting to act on their desires. I can imagine why to some this restraint could be frustrating and static. But to me, it was swollen, pregnant with poetry about a private moment. It served as a cinematic, thrilling, record of interesting, curious women coming to terms with their humanity while engaged in everyday activities in settings of natural light and simple design.
It also contains an element of the silly that creeps up on the audience. When does dawn begin anyway? And when does night end? How is anyone to know the demarcating few fleeting seconds of quiet that purse themselves between these? The act of committing the first moments to a day is cited for its levity and routine. But what about the moments that came before that? How easily are they erased from the final draft of the day. The way Reinette raises her hopes before the moment descends, it feels like an entrance into the unknowable. After rain sodden days, it feels like a pursuance of a calm, a sigh, even a cove alive with light.
If you like what you read, share this with friends, folks, colleagues who like to read. I will write soon again.
Recent work: On Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Parts 1&2; On Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever