It is the connection with Pascal that explains why Rohmer’s work is often linked to Jansenism. Jansenism was a movement in seventeenth-century Catholicism which argued that original sin has so corrupted nature that everything empirical is evil. The only hope for redemption is through the grace that is the gift of the God who is hidden from the world except in the unasked-for moments of the miracle. Within the Jansenist perspective then, each person must persevere to achieve a preparedness to receive the gift of God, although whether or not that particular person has the grace to accept the gift is quite beyond comprehension.

More specifically, it can be proposed that Rohmer’s films explore a Pascalian understanding of grace. They are explorations of how grace is embodied in the empirical social world, and how it transforms moments and appearances into something ‘real’. Rohmer’s films show how important it is for us to cultivate a way of seeing the world that is open to the miracle that irrupts unexpectedly.

Grace is the help that God gives to humans to attend to His call. It is supernatural and cannot be asked for or hurried along by human action or intervention.

What Rohmer explores, through his focus on the world as it is and on men and women in their empirical surroundings, are the mistakes which mean that the moment of the infusion of the ‘heavenly sweetness’ is missed, the delusions through which men and women seek to hurry it along or find it even when it is absent, and, finally, the selfdeceptions and strategies in relation to others through which men and women justify to themselves their free choice to withdraw from grace.

Rohmer’s films are examinations of how men and women freely respond to the irruption of God in the everyday, how they notice it (if they do), and whether and how that irruption implies preservation from temptation in self-understanding and the understanding of others.

What makes Rohmer’s films so questioning – and question provoking – is their refusal to present the miracle that can transform the empirical into the real as a magical moment that appears with thunder and lightning. Instead it is fragile, small and too easily misrecognised (hence the ‘misdirected attachments’ that feature in ‘Rohmer territory’, and hence also the panning shots of landscapes which invite the audience to look out for signs that may appear, or then again may not). Introduction 17 It is to be seen in a chance meeting, the gesture of a hand or the shape of a knee, not a cataclysm. The miracle is an irruption of new possibilities and consequently a moment of new uncertainties, not a sentimental closure. Similarly, Rohmer’s films rarely end with a moment of closure. They tend to end with the intimation of a new beginning.

The moment of irruption – the moment of the miracle – can be recognised only by those who are prepared to see it, and the question that the films explore is whether the characters – and by extension empirically real people ‘like us’ – will be able to persevere in trying to see, will be possessed of a disposition to continue to seek, even if the signs are missed or, indeed, never evident. Rohmer’s films are hopeful because they establish the possibility that even when they feel distant from the miracle of the ‘real’ that will infuse their lives with meaning, men and women can aspire to be open to more than the merely empirical, but this openness requires that attention always be paid to what surrounds and that it never be avoided. Grace comes, if it comes at all, in nature and in the human nature of sociability. In this way, empirical realism creates opportunities for the recognition of the irruption of the transcendentally real, and Rohmer’s films pose questions to their audiences: Is this film going to be a mere diversion or will you devote attention to seeing it? Is this film a distraction or will you be committed to try to see signs of grace? What is your disposition?