Eric Rohmer’s late films are charming and theologically rich, says Andrew Petiprin.
Eric Rohmer has long been a darling of European arthouse cinema, having been a major auteur of the French New Wave and editor of the Cahiers du Cinéma. Yet even as he rubbed shoulders with the intellectual elites of the Left Bank, Rohmer was openly Catholic and conservat-ive. He wrote to the right-wing Romanian-French journalist Jean Parvulesco in 1964: “I am a Catholic. I believe that a true cinema is necessarily a Christian cinema, because there is no truth except in Christianity.” The films in his famous Six Moral Tales from 1963 to 1972 reflected this faith, proposing an alternative to the intellectual Spirit of ’68, with characters almost miraculously choosing the good instead of mainstream hedonism.
