André Aciman on discovering Éric Rohmer | TIFF 2021

Call Me by Your Name author André Aciman remembers the “life-changing” experience of seeing Éric Rohmer’s MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S, opening a gateway to the French master’s ultra-subtle oeuvre. Rohmer has become a guiding influence of much contemporary cinema: from Hong Sang-soo to Andrew Bujalski, Benjamin Crotty to Eugène Green, Corneliu Porombiou to — of all people — Quentin Tarantino.

Less aggressive, confessional, and iconoclastic than his New Wave cohorts, Rohmer did, however, share their voracious cinephilia. He made his mark first as a superb critic and later as the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, championing such directors as Murnau, Hawks, Hitchcock, and Preminger. Having come late to films — “Until I was 16 I hadn’t seen a thing,” he confessed — Rohmer absorbed and exhibited his influences in a manner subtler than did Godard, Truffaut, or Rivette.

Rohmer maintained an almost religious adherence to realism, to a simple, unmannered rendering of the world whose clarity, plain arrangement, and quiet precision bespoke the rationality of his thought. This extended even to the realm of speech — before writing his scripts the director would spend hours in tape-recorded conversation with his actors in order to adapt his dialogue to their particular verbal styles — and speech, while not everything in Rohmer’s cinema, is its defining feature.

Rohmer’s characters search for happiness, truth, and self knowledge, but mostly they seek love. “I have not seen a Rohmer film I did not admire.” —Roger Ebert

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