The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon)

THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON (Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon)     B+               
France  Italy  Spain  (109 mi)  2007  d:  Éric Rohmer

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.  

—Jaques, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, by William Shakespeare, published in 1623

Rohmer often comes across somewhat flat emotionally, over-intellectualizing, planting meanings under subtexts of hidden meanings, much of which is too subtle to even grasp as you’re watching his films.  In other words, lots of talk while not much happens, usually accompanied by an underlying sensuality where sex and love rarely meet while the much discussed subject is approached from a discreet distance.  Rohmer’s films display a detached reserve that some might find slow and languid, as his characters take their time, analyze and over-analyze their actions, as if every look and every gesture had some inner meaning that was apparent to the entire world, but missed, of course, by the one it was intended to arouse.  There’s a dry comic wit on display, but it’s so understated many may not notice it at all.  Certainly all is not what it seems here, as Rohmer has chosen to adapt a 17th century romantic novel by Honoré d'Urfé called L'Astrée, which was set in 5th century Gaul, to be viewed by a 21st century audience with modern sensibilities. 

One should acknowledge flat out that the depiction of a historical costume drama set in a time so long ago with a literary language that feels read, not spoken, will lose more than half the audience who will find it ridiculous.  A theater audience, on the other hand, might be more amenable, but nonetheless, in what is his final film, Rohmer has turned the world at large into a mythical fairy tale, an idyllic paradise where shepherds pass their time playing a flute in the fields while tending to their sheep, while also wooing maidens at every available opportunity.  Dressed in off the shoulder white tunics, the women with long, flowing curly hair, wandering from pasture to wood, this has an Old Testament era feel to it, but the characters here follow the post-Roman, pre-Christian teachings of druids, considered especially learned, and make pilgrimages to visit them from time to time.  Along the way the subject of love is much discussed, and sometimes even sung about.   

It’s hard not to like this film, as it’s so uniquely different from what we’re used to seeing, and there’s literally nothing else out there like it, making it a unique challenge where one develops an affection for the archaic language played so straight.  The film is more about the innocence and purity of love, truth, devotion, fidelity, notions that in the modern world have been altered to such a degree they are nearly unrecognizable.  Rohmer adapts a tale where they still resonated with the characters, where words affected responses, which had immediate impact in their lives.  The Druids also believed in only one God, but the Romans mangled the interpretations to fit their own culture, creating statues for each of their own gods, confusing the populace for generations to come.  There’s a single conversation in the film that clarifies their original intent.  They could just as easily have been talking about how Supreme Court cases have mangled the original intent of the founders of the Constitution, how decades or centuries of misinformation have transformed the views of the public.  The purity of intent becomes the subject of young lovers.   

As Rohmer was 87 at the time of the film’s release, it is interesting to note another film that comes to mind, especially in its languorous pace, Manoel De Olveira’s INQUIETUDE (1998), who was 90 when that film was released, in particular the third section of De Olveira’s triptych, which is a series of three one-act plays combined to form a single narrative, filmed entirely outdoors where Irene Pappas plays an ancient river nymph, which appears set during the times of Greek mythology.  Here similarly Druids and nymphs mix with shepherds and shepherdesses in this bucolic mix of pastoral bliss.  But from the outset, something is not right, as Astréa (Stéphanie Crayencour) catches her guy Céladon (Andy Gillet) kissing another maiden, an act of appeasement meant to please warring families, but causing her to tell him in anger that she never wants to see him again.  Taking her words literally, Céladon believes he has no choice but death, so immediately throws himself into the river and is believed drowned, as there is no sign of him afterwards.  Astréa, of course, has a change of heart, and blames herself mercilessly for losing the love of her life.  But Druid nymphs secretly rescue Céladon and nurse him back to health, where he actually believes he’s died and gone to heaven, as he may as well be in another world, which could just as easily be Valhalla or Tolkien’s Gray Havens.  Uncomfortable with such perfection, Céladon wants to be thrown back into his world where he remains shunned forever from Astréa, believing his devotion to her is abiding by her will when she commanded him to leave her sight.  Despite all rational discourse to the contrary, Céladon lives the life of a hermit hidden deep in the forest away from his true love.  

His reticence is challenged when Astréa joins a pilgrimage to the Druid castle, where Céladon finds Astréa still fast asleep in a state of sensual repose, where Rohmer’s camera lingers over her inert body gazing along with the character who secretly disguises himself as a Druid maiden to remain true to his oath.  This takes on comical dimensions as he continues to stumble all over himself to avoid revealing his true identity, as they immediately become the closest of friends, like The Magic Flute’s Papageno and Papagena, where their flirtatious behavior draws the notice of all except Astréa who is totally smitten by this new Druid maiden.  While remaining chaste and pure may have little relevance in the modern era where sex before marriage is fairly standard, not in the 5th century, where the concept of love retained its original intent, expressed here like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, where Astréa like Venus, the goddess of beauty, retains her immortal aura of innocence and pure love.  Rohmer seems to be implying how far we’ve come in altering (or butchering, much like the Romans) the essence of meaning over time, giving us a before and after snapshot, where the screen reminds us of our Renaissance-like idyllic roots, while our own lives serve as a crass and shallow alteration, reminding us how far we’ve strayed from what was once understood to be the transformative powers of love.

My Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud)

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (Ma Nuit Chez Maud)           A                    

France  (110 mi)  1969  d:  Éric Rohmer

You have two things to lose:  the true and the good; and two things to stake:  your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid:  error and wretchedness.  Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other.  That is one point cleared up.  But your happiness?  Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists.  Let us assess the two cases:  if you win, you win everything:  if you lose, you lose nothing.  Do not hesitate then:  wager that he does exist.

—Pascal's Wager from Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, 1669

Throughout Rohmer’s career, he kept searching for life’s secrets and meanings, sharing his understandings with his audience in what might be called a lifelong conversation in search of meaning.  But it’s here in this film that it all began, as it is perhaps the most autobiographical of Rohmer films, where Jean-Louis, Jean-Louis Trintignant using his own name (though “I” is the only name used in the film), is the stand-in for the director with his moody, self-absorbed, Catholic intellectualizing, while Françoise Fabian as Maud is perhaps his idealized woman, beautiful, strong, atheistic, and equally intelligent, perhaps a bit more mature than the men she knows as she’s more certain of herself, while the blond and Catholic Marie-Christine Barrault as Françoise is a more compatible version of his ideal wife.  More than anything else, this is a film of ideas, the ones that haunt the artistic creator, obviously, but the universality of philosophical thought carries over into the lives of the audience.  This film is almost scientific in the way it presents itself, well thought out ahead of time, perfectly harmonious and balanced, the only one of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (Six Contes moraux, 1963–72) that was shot during the winter.  As an example of Rohmer’s commitment to detail, he insisted that the shooting for this film had to begin during the Christmas holiday season, but when actor Jean-Louis Trintignant was unable to make that precise date, Rohmer postponed the film for a year until all the stars in the sky were properly aligned.  As a result, chronologically it changes the sequence of the Six Moral Tales, where this is supposedly the third in the sequence, but the fourth LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (1967) was shot two years earlier.  The film is consistent in the third spot, however, introducing thematic complexity to the story, including maturity from the characters, who in the other 5 episodes are much younger, while maintaining a certain symmetry as the first three Tales are in black and white, none more beautifully than MAUD, while the final three are shot in color.  As the centerpiece of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, using older and more mature characters, each one involved in their careers, this was Rohmer’s only use of professional actors throughout the entire series other than Jean-Claude Brialy in CLAIRE’S KNEE (1970), where the director insisted upon using Brialy against type.  Here responsibility is a given, as 34-year old Jean-Louis has traveled to Canada, America, and Chile through his job as an engineer for Michelin, has had his share of relationships with women, but now is attempting to settle down, where he’s single, serious, and unattached, but Catholicism is an essential component of his life.  In one of the earliest scenes, he’s at church just before Christmas listening to the mass as he sees a young blond across the aisle, vowing then and there to marry her.  When he attempts to follow her on her motorbike afterwards, he loses her in the traffic.

Mirroring the narrative of the first Moral Tale, THE BAKERY GIRL OF MONCEAU (La Boulangère de Monceau, 1963), the protagonist falls in love with a woman he sees on the street without ever having spoken to her, but then becomes sidetracked and involved with another woman who literally consumes his interest before accidentally running into the first woman, where in each instance a choice must be made.  Purely by accident, the story veers into another direction when he runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a former student friend, now a marxist philosophy professor at a local university that he hasn’t seen in 14 years.  They pick up where they left off, however, discussing the merits of Pascal and Catholicism, attempting to apply mathematical logic to abstract thoughts, combining mathematics and metaphysics, where both are well aware of each other’s views, with Vidal commenting, “To a communist, Pascal’s ‘wager’ is very real,” claiming “Gorky, Lenin, or maybe Mayakovsky talking about the Russian revolution said that circumstances forced them to take the chance in a thousand because it was infinitely better to take that chance than no chance at all.”  Together they attend a concert of violinist Léonide Kogan playing a Mozart piano and violin sonata, integrating art into the equation, highlighting the contrast between the painted angels on the ceiling at the performance and the massive empty space above the parishioners inside the cathedral, both houses of thoughtful contemplation. When Vidal invites him to an evening dinner engagement with Maud, identified as a good friend and occasional lover, coming from a family of free thinkers (or Freemasons) where irreligion is a form of religion, whose winning attributes are her intelligence and beauty, Jean-Louis continues where he left off, reflecting upon a life of moral values that would embrace faith, where Catholicism is encapsulated in delineating the complex nature of morality rather than demarcating clear distinctions between good and evil.  Separating himself from sacred devotion through abstinence, “As a Christian, I say it’s evil not to acknowledge what is good,” acknowledging that he can appreciate the fine wine that comes from the region, believing religion enhances not only one’s life, but the merits of marriage.  “Religion adds to love, but love adds to religion also,” where at that moment Maud’s young daughter peeps her head out the door, as if adding context to the stated premise.  His strict and somewhat selfish principles take the non-believers by surprise, so they continually tease him, as they’re basically excluded from his existential philosophy that only concerns his own personal salvation.  The key ingredients to the film include naturalism, an element that exists in all Rohmer films, but also a willingness to present a free-flowing discussion of ideas relating to life, relationships, and our place in a world that incorporates faith.  This identifies the central themes of the Six Moral Tales, which continue to be discussed throughout the film. 

Perhaps it might be interesting to note that the precise definition of “moral” means something slightly different in French than the same word in English.  Quoting Rohmer who elaborates extensively in Graham Petrie’s interview from Film Quarterly, Summer 1971:

In French there is a word moraliste that I don’t think has any equivalent in English.  It doesn’t really have much connection with the word “moral.”  A moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man.  He’s concerned with states of mind and feelings.  For example, in the eighteenth century Pascal was a moraliste, and a moraliste is a particularly French kind of writer like Le Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, and you could also call Stendahl a moraliste because he describes what people feel and think.  So Contes Moraux doesn’t really mean that there’s a moral contained in them, even though there might be one and all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairy clearly worked out. In Ma Nuit Chez Maud these ideas are very precise; for all the characters in the other films they are rather more vague, and morality is a very personal matter.  But they try to justify everything in their behavior and that fits the word “moral” in its narrowest sense.  But “moral” can also mean that they are people who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open.  They try to analyze; they are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing.  What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself.  They aren’t films of action, they aren’t films in which physical action takes place, they aren’t films in which there is anything very dramatic, they are films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective.  That’s what Contes Moraux means.     

The discussion on Pascal and Christianity alone are worth the price of admission, where a half century later they remain as blisteringly intense and applicable in today’s world, proof that films with ideas last, while conventionality fades.  Trintignant’s man of faith character is consistent with many of the roles he took throughout his career, an educated man of conscience who often sees himself drowning in mediocrity, such as his infamous role as a sexually repressed secret police agent seeking redemption through normalcy during the fall of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship in Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST (1970).  But the philosophical discussion only leads us into Maud’s apartment, who conveniently dismisses the professor on grounds he’s had too much to drink, leaving her alone with her man of principles.  The astonishing power of the film is the performance of Françoise Fabian, an Algerian by birth, the widow of French director Jacques Becker, and while thirty years younger, she never appeared in any of his films.  She did, however, work for Luis Buñuel in his provocative tale of erotic surrealism in BELLE DE JOUR (1967), Jacques Rivette’s near 13-hour masterwork OUT 1 (1971), also OUT 1: SPECTRE (1974), while appearing again in a dream sequence of Rohmer’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972), the concluding film of the Six Moral Tales.  While she has appeared in more than 80 films since 1956, she is a revelation here, a modern woman, a free spirit, sexy, intellectually engaging, and sophisticated, one of the more intriguing female characters to appear in French films, while largely unheralded, as her appearance in the film is a complete surprise.  She is vibrant and stunningly beautiful, unconventionally liberated, has that mysterious, indefinable female essence, appears smarter than Jean-Louis in every sense, certainly more openly honest, can hold her own on any subject, remains true to her convictions, yet the film focuses nearly all its attention on him.  They spend the night in her apartment sharing intimate conversations, where the contrast between the two is the tale of the film, as she sensuously manipulates him into her bed, though he remains wrapped in a blanket, but it’s the wintry season, so it gets cold at night.  While he convinces himself that he’s into something deeper, she sleeps naked where the sexual invitation appears open, as she does invite him into her bed, while teasing him about his “dream woman,” the blond he’s only seen and never spoken to.  The choice becomes Pascal’s wager, as Maud is there in the flesh, in the here and now, while his other option exists only in his head.

The gorgeously austere black and white cinematography by Néstor Almendros is striking, especially the wintry town of Clermont-Ferrand during the Christmas season in the snow.  Pascal’s ideas are not only introduced, but become the overriding theme of the story, where the center of interest is free choice.  Will a man bet his future happiness on marrying a girl he has only seen, and will that translate to a fulfilling married life together?  Morality for Rohmer in his Moral Tales does not mean normal moral behavior, but rather a struggle within a certain individual to come to terms with crucial decisions, while being able to explain to himself and those around him his or her rationale for these decisions.  While romantic interests seem to fuel this speculation, in this film the holy trinity is reflected by the triangular sets of ideas embodied in the three main characters, a Catholic, a Marxist, and an agnostic.  A fourth is added to the equation when Jean-Louis finally introduces himself to Françoise on the street in an awkward introduction, while meeting again shortly thereafter when he offers to drive her home during a heavy snow.  When his car conveniently gets stuck outside her student dormitory apartment, she offers him a spare room, where he behaves like a perfect gentleman.  Later they are seen in church together (for the first time), as only then can an appropriate relationship ensue, where each acknowledges previous love affairs, but agrees to leave them in the past.  Five years later they are married with a young child vacationing at the beach (which is actually a setting on the island of Belle Île, a favorite setting for Claude Monet who painted the rock formations, File:Claude Monet Pyramides Port Coton.jpg - Wikimedia ..., also Storm off the belle ile coast - by Claude Monet), when they run into Maud.  Apparently she and Françoise are familiar with one another, but not on good terms, where it is implied that Françoise’s previous affair with a married man was likely the husband of Maud.  The surprise at seeing one another evokes similar feelings of the past, which quickly resurface, as the two obviously have some chemistry together, perhaps reminding him of what he’s lost, while she remains at ease with herself, confident as ever.  Jean-Louis, however, as an engineer with an interest in mathematics is more calculating, where certain conditions must be met before he can love a woman — first and foremost she must be a Catholic, and the rest will follow — while for Maud love is unconditional, with no strings attached.  All the forces are at play here in this simple exchange, which ends blissfully in such a picturesque realm, where the viewers will continually have to ask themselves where they fit into so many of these fateful moments, some of which occur by sheer coincidence, suggesting happiness will always rely upon some element of chance.             

The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion)

Jean-Luc Godard making his appearance during the party sequence

Éric Rohmer on the Rue de la Huchette during the making of the film short La Sonate à Kreutzer, 1956

THE SIGN OF LEO (Le signe du lion)             B+                  

France  (103 mi)  1959  d:  Éric Rohmer

Maintaining his secrecy throughout his life, Rohmer was either born in Tulle (southwestern France) under the name Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer or born in Nancy (northeastern France) under the name Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer.  The truth remains a mystery.  His first feature was made in 1959 for Claude Chabrol’s new production company AJYM, though the film was recut and restored in 1962 when Chabrol was forced to sell the company and Rohmer disowned the recut version.  In 1962 Rohmer and his longtime producer Barbet Schroeder co-founded the production company Les films du losange which produced all of Rohmer's work except his final three features.  A lone film, not part of his Comedies And Proverbs or Moral Tales, it has continually slipped under the radar of Rohmer retrospectives, along with half a dozen rare short films from the 50’s ranging in length from 10 to 50 minutes that never screened outside of France.  Rohmer was already over 40 by the completion of this film, at least ten years older than any of the other critics who went on to become filmmakers in the Cahiers du Cinéma group, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette, and his first film failed to have the explosive impact of his contemporaries, where The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), LES COUSINS (1959), and BREATHLESS (1960) were very much in the style of early French New Wave, becoming a major disappointment for Rohmer who returned to his work at Cahiers and continued making 16 mm shorts while having to wait another decade before making another feature.  Unavailable on DVD (though available on Region 2, Eric Rohmer - The Early Works) and one of the hardest Rohmer films to see, viewers will have to search out film schools and art house theaters for a screening of this film. 

Rohmer is considered the most literary and conservative-minded of the Cahiers group, whose low-budget films were rigorously prepared and shot, but in contrast to the early films of his contemporaries, where every frame announces it intends to change the course of cinema, this has none of the jarring New Wave techniques, yet it aptly belongs with those films by bringing the camera out into the streets, making bold use of urban locales as the aesthetic architecture of the film, where shooting locations become an expression of the character’s interior world.  While it’s a very poised and austere morality tale, taking an absurdist view of life where fate can be uncommonly cruel and without mercy, the heavily despairing overall mood is a sobering cinematic experience.  Rohmer is accused of focusing his attention on the banality of life, characterized by overly chatty, dialogue-driven films, often featuring educated, yet highly materialistic characters, including intellectuals and artists, who are constantly talking about themselves, placing themselves at the center of their existence, yet happiness, and the security of emotional attachments, remain elusive.  Rohmer has used no music in his films after this one and has always been an interior storyteller, confining himself to conventional, neatly contained, bourgeois worlds where racial diversity, for instance, simply doesn’t exist, and characters quickly grow alienated from the world around them, often displaced from God and unable to find meaning in their existence.  What is perhaps most unique about Rohmer is not so much his heralded literacy, but his undeniable success in finding cinematic images for common, everyday and ordinary moments that would otherwise seem so uncinematic.  While characters usually discuss these moral concepts at length, known for his characteristic literary and philosophical classicism, not in this film, a more gloomy effort where themes of disillusionment are instead wordlessly introduced through visual internalization.  Supposedly a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where his film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975) could be described as a variation on a similar theme, unrelentingly pessimistic, where a down and out carnival worker (Fassbinder as Fox) wins the lottery and suddenly has friends mooching off him left and right, all contending to be friends, which Fox desperately wants to believe, until they’ve stolen everything he has, leaving him utterly penniless and alone. 

Rohmer’s film has an unusual lead, Indiana-born Jess Hahn, a U.S. Marine who served in France during the war and became a French citizen afterwards, playing Pierre, whose heft and strong man appearance could easily pass as a gangster in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, a French-speaking American musician living a bohemian existence in Paris who is surrounded by well-to-do friends, who at the outset is informed his fabulously wealthy aunt has died, where he assumes right away he’s rich beyond his dreams, even sharing the inheritance with his cousin, inviting everyone he knows over to his flat for a celebratory party, borrowing money and running up huge debts, as accumulating bills are suddenly the least of his worries, where in typical Chabrol style (each of his earliest films feature an elaborate party sequence), he features an exuberant, but entirely naturalistic, bohemian party scene with an abundance of food and free flowing wine, where none other than Jean-Luc Godard in dark glasses, taking a break from shooting BREATHLESS (1960), shows up playing his favorite passage on the phonograph player over and over again.  In the morning he’s served an eviction notice, also news that his cousin inherited everything, so he’s quickly booted to the street, the first sign of his precipitous fall from grace.  At first, he maintains his friendships and easy connections, but they soon lose touch when’s he’s thrown out of every last known address, where angry hotel landlady Stéphane Audran (lead actress and former spouse of Chabrol) insists upon reporting him to the police (her brother is a policeman), so all hotels refuse to accept him.  As a result, Pierre spends his time endlessly walking around the Parisian neighborhoods, becoming something of a love letter to the bohemian quarters, selling his books to a mystery lover street vendor, none other than Jean-Pierre Melville, spending his final few pennies on bread, where eventually he’s forced to sleep on the street, where a dissonant and psychologically shatteringly Louis Sageur violin piece plays throughout (a rarity in a Rohmer film), whose exasperating repetitiveness may prove irksome for some.   

 

The jovial tone of the film shifts to neo realism and becomes a long, drawn out and near wordless encounter with the streets of Paris in the 50’s, capturing the mood and atmosphere of the steamy hot month of August, using the available natural light of summer, shot by pre-war cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, where despite the New Wave’s love of the streets in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Godard’s BREATHLESS, Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (both 1960), Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), or even Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), no other film is as graphically detailed in such carefully observed documentary style, where the city becomes the dominant force of the film, literally teeming with life from the cars on the street, strolling pedestrians, patrons sitting in outdoor café’s, to the narrow confines of hawking street vendors, like a street bazaar, and on into the heavily populated city parks, where the idle can sit uninterrupted for hours on benches, or even sleep at night, literally a time capsule conveying the sights and sounds, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid destitution, and living among the working poor.  Similarly, Rohmer’s film is a bleak portrait of despair, where without friends or money or food, Pierre’s life is spiraling into a physical and spiritual decline, where his existentialist journey of endlessly walking the streets also becomes a picturesque cinematic travelogue not only of the photogenic bridges extended across the Seine River with people sitting along the river banks, but Paris is also viewed as a cumbersome city, often loud and dirty and hot, especially when seen through the eyes of the impoverished, where an air of gloom hangs over the city, especially alone at night, lonely and painful moments conveyed through the emptiness of a series of night shots. 

The is not the familiar New Wave setting of Paris with pretty girls, fast cars, or gunfights, but is a nightmarish, cruel, and indifferent city where the protagonist is not seen hanging around the street café’s, but along the lower riverbanks of the Seine, where the city is seen as an urban inferno, frustrating, and utterly forbidding.  The city itself stands for the doomed protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind, where the customary welcoming attraction of the City of Lights, where Paris is considered the romance capital of the world, sweet and inviting, instead turns into a heartlessly dark city where he finds himself abjectively alone.  Pierre is continually portrayed as a human ghost walking among the living, watching intimate couples kissing or overhearing bits and pieces of conversations, until it appears he is beyond hope, that he has lost all connection to humankind.  For whatever reason, the man is never seen looking for work, though he does work up a musical act performed in front of tourists in the street café’s under the wing of another street tramp (Jean Le Poulain) he meets on the banks of the Seine, a loud street peddler who ingratiates himself to American tourists and the wealthy, asking for donations, as he often makes a spectacle of himself, which Pierre hates and finds humiliating, though there are moments of humor, such as this stream of overheard conversation, “Is that beggar playing Bartok?”  “No, he’s just out of tune.”  “Well, it’s modern at any rate.”  Co-written by Paul Gégauff (who wrote the dialogue), ironically this was the only time that Rohmer did not write the dialogue to one of his movies.  Interspersed throughout Pierre’s wanderings are glimpses of his former friends, a newspaper photographer continually sent out of the country on work assignment, or friends discussing his disappearance, where now even if they saw him, due to his haggard appearance, they wouldn’t recognize him.  But what Rohmer’s really suggesting is that money determines your identity and social status, that without it you’re invisible and may as well not even exist to the rest of the country.  The director then rethinks that thought and offers a less fatalistic view, one apparently more in tune with chance and the possibilities of the cosmos, more akin with the finale of his later work, Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986).  THE SIGN OF LEO is the only Rohmer film to exhibit any hint of lower class consciousness, where the tragic hero descends into dire poverty and homelessness, but nonetheless continues to wear a suit, like most all of Rohmer’s male characters, spending the rest of his career exclusively probing the interior consciousness of the middle class.