How Eric Rohmer’s ‘Comedies and Proverbs’ perfectly encapsulates the challenges of young adulthood
No point in your life is going to be easy. We all struggle through our adolescent years. While the term ‘mid-life crisis’ exists for a reason, few can debate the sheer number of difficulties that come with being in your 20s. Entering adulthood for the first time, you’ll likely experience many significant firsts during this era of your life, like living with a partner or getting onto the career ladder. Yet, the overarching feeling is often one of being stuck in limbo.
At times, it feels like you’re still that immature 16-year-old who has unrealistic goals for your future life, and other times, you’re forced into the fires of adulthood, dealing with taxes, renting, working, and looking after yourself. It’s undoubtedly scary. Your 20s is also the time in which everyone you know is doing something completely different – some people are still living at home, while others are married with kids.
The pressure to hit milestones, find happiness, and juggle various responsibilities for the first time is truly a chore, but in Eric Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs series, he gives his characters the chance to messily explore key areas of early adulthood. In all of these films, made between 1981 and 1987, Rohmer typically follows a woman in her mid to late 20s grappling with love, friendship, and self-discovery, often feeling like she’s lagging behind.
These stories are refreshing, painting an accurate depiction of the fact that life isn’t linear, milestones are just social constructs, and it’s OK to be pushing 30 while being unmarried and childless. The first film in the series, The Aviator’s Wife, is an excellent look at desire, with the 20-year-old François utterly obsessed with Anne, five years his senior. After convincing himself that she is dating another man, he spends his day theorising and spying, leading to a long conversation between the two at the end of the film. Rohmer perfectly encapsulates the recklessness inspired by intense desire while emphasising the childishness many of us still possess when we enter adulthood, not yet ready to deal with big and powerful emotions.
With A Good Marriage, Rohmer again allows his protagonist to be desperate, sharply analysing the way that social norms have left poor Sabine, played by Beatrice Romand, on the hunt for a husband. She is just 25, but as everyone around her gets coupled up, she can’t help but feel the pressure, setting her sights on a man ten years her senior. It’s sometimes hard to watch, with Sabine’s desperation often coming across as painful, but, most importantly, it’s real.
The following year, Rohmer released Pauline at the Beach, one of his most fun movies. Romantic entanglements cause plenty of drama between generations as characters in their teens, 20s, and 30s all find themselves bewitched by the sun and the sea, allowing their sexual impulses to take over. Rohmer asks vital questions here about innocence, with Pauline’s initiation into the adult world soon proving that older people can often be as immature, if not more, and capable of making plenty of mistakes. In Rohmer’s world, a character is never going to have their life properly figured out.
In Full Moon in Paris, released in 1984, Louise spends most of the film figuring out her stance on relationships, unable to feel settled and satisfied while living with her boyfriend, Remi, and desiring more alone time. In her mid-20s, she grapples with the need for stability and the desire to party and not get tied down just yet, something many viewers can surely relate to. With Rohmer’s naturalistic flair and his ability to let his actors converse as though the camera isn’t there, he crafts a relatable world of early adult dilemmas that few filmmakers have portrayed so accurately.
Arguably, the magnum opus of the series, The Green Ray, came next, with Marie Rivière playing the emotional and lost Delphine, who searches for meaning and companionship following a break-up. Attempting to find peace while holidaying, she finds herself clashing with people and feeling like an outsider, and Rohmer terrifically captures that sense of disconnect and pure isolation that is common in your 20s. Everyone around Delphine seems to have it figured out, but she wanders, almost like a flâneuse, observing how much easier friends and strangers seem to experience the world.
The series came to an end with Boyfriends and Girlfriends, also known as My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, in which a pair of new friends, Lea and Blanche, become entangled as the latter falls for both Lea’s friend and ex-boyfriend. Rohmer rounds off the series by depicting this new class of young French people, occupied with work but still making time for complex romantic and platonic scenarios. Perhaps more than usual, Rohmer uses colour and setting to aid vital themes in his story, with the newness of Blanche’s home reflecting her view of her surroundings, in which she can project endless possibilities.
It’s nowhere near as emotional as The Green Ray or cringe-inducing as A Good Marriage, but Rohmer still wields his philosophical approach to relationships with extreme precision. While Rohmer had explored young characters in other films, like Suzanne’s Career and La Collectionneuse in the 1960s, it’s his 1980s series that saw him reach the heights of his preoccupation with young French people and their many moral predicaments. These films feel so real and raw, with the director crafting characters that are perfectly flawed and uncertain.
In their wake, films like Before Sunrise, Frances Ha, and Goodbye, First Love have emerged carrying a clear Rohmerian debt. His Comedies and Proverbs series tapped into the insecurities, endless possibilities, social pressures, and mental turmoil felt universally by so many 20-something-year-olds, and his exploration of these issues across six beautiful and honest films has become incredibly influential.
