A delightful Rohmer omnibus as four short films featuring the two titular characters—one a countryside girl, the other a city girl—give us an intellectual if light-hearted take on how independent women can thrive in a manipulative society.
Shot like a stage play on a minimalist set, Rohmer’s experiment with narration and storytelling about a man who dreams of becoming one of King Arthur’s knights is interesting but may be a tad too long.
An anomaly in Rohmer’s filmography, this beautiful if minimalist period costume drama about a woman who doesn’t know how she got pregnant feels like a stage exercise rather than an embracing, organic work.
Arguably Rohmer’s most iconic ‘moral tale’—the plot of an older man’s fetish for a teenage girl’s bare knee makes for great philosophical musings about the nature of lust and love.
Rohmer’s first feature might not have been as lauded as his counterparts’ more groundbreaking works, but its exploration of luck (or lack thereof) through one man’s misery was arguably the closest a French New Wave film had been to acknowledging its neorealist influences.
Lust and personal resolve collide in Rohmer’s first feature in colour, lensed with warmth and sensuality by Days of Heaven’s Nestor Almendros.
The last of Rohmer’s ‘Comedies & Proverbs’ series is a gratifying watch on what it means to fall in love—or break up—with friends and lovers.
Probably the finest of Rohmer’s ‘Comedies & Proverbs’ series—a sublime, psychologically rich work about the emotional struggles to be open to romantic relationships yet it is also about being free and finding thyself.
A young woman tests the limits of her romantic relationship by concurrently experimenting with being ‘single’ in one of Rohmer’s bleaker offerings on the existential nature of love.
Rohmer plays an elaborate, frolicky game of relationship misunderstandings and coverups in his third ‘Comedies & Proverbs’ series, as most of the characters try to make sense—with sheer incompetence—what the meaning of love is.
