Thursday, January 21, 2021

The Aviator's Wife (Eric Rohmer, 1981)

 


One can’t think of nothing, states the maxim at the start of Eric Rohmer’s The Aviator’s Wife, and the movie encourages one to view the assertion with some regret, to muse that if one could transcend one’s daily clutter of interactions and obligations and desires, and all the stresses and anxieties that accompany them, one might attain something fuller and purer, in which thinking of nothing would constitute the ultimate fulfilment. As it is though (and in contrast to a pivotal earlier work like My Night at Maud’s) the characters in The Aviator’s Wife never approach such thoughts, being consumed entirely by that daily bric-a-brac, by the false narratives built upon it and their vast consumption of time and internal space (the title artfully sums up this state, referring to a person who’s not in the film and whom a couple of key characters fail to correctly identify). Almost as hard as thinking of nothing, perhaps, is looking while seeing nothing, and the film is driven by several incidents of one character observing another (a young man seeing his sort-of-girlfriend emerge from her building after apparently spending the night with her supposed ex, then later observing that same man with another woman) and then becoming wrapped up the implications of what was witnessed – this can be a liberation of sorts, as illustrated by the film’s lightest section, an extended interaction in the park between two people who’ve just met, but (as the film also illustrates in its final moments) not likely a lasting one. As always in Rohmer’s films, the film is marked by great emotional delicacy and versatility, the tone and dynamic of conversations often turning on a dime: there’s an aspirational quality to it, in how even the frustrations and disappointments are more eloquently embodied, and by more beautiful people, than normal life generally allows, but never to an extent that constitutes mere fantasy or denial of possibility.

No comments:

Post a Comment