There are very few close-ups or focus pulls, and all the time a gap is maintained between the viewer and the viewed. This is a cinema of observation; observation by the film-maker and of the filmmaker’s production by the audience. But the audience is all the time encouraged to engage with the film, because the deep focus and long takes create the space and time in which choices can – and have to – be made about precisely what is going to be observed, and whether it will be remembered.

The ‘territory’ of Rohmer’s films is not just spatial or stylistic, however. It is also thematic. Rohmer’s work concentrates relentlessly on the confusions and self-deceptions of young(ish) educated men and women who have realised that ‘Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life’.

This is desire as wanting, or perhaps even as a request that is made to an other, as opposed to desire as eroticism and sexual activity. It is love as petition to the other, a love through which possibilities beyond the empirical might be seen if the characters have the sight and disposition so to see.

 

‘All I ask of grace is that it open up to me the possibility, however slight, of being touched by it’.

 

This becomes clear when Rohmer makes comments of the order that ‘not only is there a beauty and an order to the world, but there is also no beauty or order that are not of the world. Otherwise, how could art, a product of human effort, equal nature, a divine creation?’ He went on to state that ‘art is the revelation, in the universe, of the Creator’s hand. True enough, there can be no position more teleological or theological than mine’

 

According to Guy Bedouelle, writing in the orthodox Catholic journal Communio, Rohmer’s work is ‘a true theo-logia, a word about God’ because it is a step on the path along which cinema will discover its ‘spiritual destiny’. Rohmer’s realism means that his work has openness to ‘Christian reality’, which Bedouelle finds in the Moral Tales. He says that the films in that series emphasise the unplanned and accidental and thereby offer ‘a reflection on the part played in life by chance meetings and roundabout ways in which we are forced to look at ourselves and which give us a deeper understanding of our moral standards’. In this way, the Moral Tales are reflections on the preparedness to receive the accidental encounter that enables us to ‘learn how to give ourselves to God and to others’. The ‘word about God’ that Rohmer’s films express is, therefore, a word about grace and the receptiveness of men and women in the empirical world to the favours that God bestows, regardless of the human asking for them.

 

The film shows that Christian grace and redemption is ‘in the order of things whose order, in the end, depends on a miracle’ even though the miracle itself is always an unexpected form of appearance. Rossellini thereby points to a way in which Catholicism can be enriched and renewed by film, and Rohmer asks the rather rhetorical question: ‘Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle?’