Interview: Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer is 84 and, praise be, still going strong. He’s been going his own inimitably sweet way for four-and-a-half decades.

Oct 18 2004

‘It’s difficult making films – especially historical films, which are more expensive – so I just can’t say whether this and “The Lady and the Duke” are part of a series. I’ve a number of ideas, and really can’t talk yet about my plans for the long term.’

Eric Rohmer is 84 and, praise be, still going strong. He’s been going his own inimitably sweet way for four-and-a-half decades, ignoring shifts in filmic fashion to focus, with a clear, miniaturist’s eye, on basics: human thought, feeling, behaviour. In this regard he’s perhaps the most dependable director around. He’s also, I’d argue, one of the greatest, an artist up there with Keaton, Renoir, Ozu, Hawks, Welles and a handful of other masters. In Rohmer’s work, as with Bach’s or Miró’s, the world is refracted through a unique, refined sensibility; since ‘meaning’ lies in precisely nuanced details, you know what to expect overall. That’s why many expressed surprise when it emerged that the latest film from a man who has perennially concerned himself with the pursuit of truth, beauty, happiness, peace and passion was an espionage movie.

Inspired by a real-life mystery and set in Paris during the second half of the ’30s, ‘Triple Agent’ centres on Vorodin, a White Russian general working in intelligence for an exiled veterans’ association, and Arsinoé, his Greek wife. She’s usually too busy with her painting to pay much mind to the political theories he puts to their communist neighbours and others, but when she’s told he was seen in Berlin, while on a trip ‘to Brussels’, she realises how little she knows him. Is he a spy working for the Nazis, the Soviets or the White Russians – all three, even? Or might his hints about his influence in high places be a way of compensating for his fallen status? In other words, the film’s packed with ambiguity, irony, paradox, nuance: this is still very much le monde Rohmerien.

‘What interested me first when I read an article about the case was that this man had simply vanished into a darkened stairwell and no one ever found out what had happened. Some think him guilty of kidnapping, others that he was innocent or just manipulated. And I was determined to preserve that mystery, which also allowed me to create my own fiction – one which, with its interest in lies, suspicion and the life of a couple, resembles many of my other films. I didn’t want it to be like most spy movies: I didn’t want to provide a definitive solution, but to tell things from the wife’s point of view. Since he hides things from her, we never actually see him in action as a spy; we only hear what he tells her.’

In reality, the wife was an opera singer, which has prompted some to suggest the general’s alleged role in a political kidnapping was the result of his wanting to give her the kind of life she was used to before she moved to France. But Rohmer makes her a somewhat reclusive painter. ‘I like to have sympathetic characters, especially the women. I could never have made a film about a woman greedy for money or fame. But I did want her to be slightly housebound, and not coming into much contact with the outside world; that meant she could be quite gullible, passive, even though as a painter she’s also someone who observes, albeit from a distance. Like the Englishwoman with the Duke, she suspects she’s being lied to; her husband becomes a mystery to her.

‘So in this respect,’ he adds, recalling an allusion I made earlier to a book he co-wrote on Hitchcock, ‘this film is perhaps like “Suspicion”.’

I’d ventured that ‘Triple Agent’ was his ‘Sabotage’ or ‘Notorious’; I also propose that where ‘The Lady and the Duke’ was about fanaticism and intolerance, the new film, with its lies and political chicanery leading to events spinning fatally out of control, is also relevant to our own situation. ‘Perhaps, but I wasn’t seeking that. I’m not interested, for example, in classical plays being staged in modern dress. I prefer to look to the truth of the past itself – distance lets us see more clearly. So I was very keen to have things as they were in the ’30s – especially the language, which has changed so much. Fortunately, of course, I was around then, and I remember how people spoke.’ The use of archive footage (a first for Rohmer) underlines this method effectively and powerfully.‘First, I considered doing what I did in “The Lady and the Duke”: to mix my own footage, somehow, with newsreels from the time. But even if I’d shot in black and white, or colourised that footage, it would have looked wrong because so many of the newsreels were shot on top of a lorry or from some such position. So I decided on the parallel structure of the couple’s life alternating with the newsreels; that way, their seemingly quiet life is set against the upheaval of the wider world.’

I tell Rohmer I consider the film his first tragedy. ‘That’s right. Even while making it I was aware of that – that’s why there’s an epilogue about the cruelty of war.’

‘Triple Agent’ screens at the LFF on Oct 22 and opens on Oct 29.

• 
•