Boyfriends and Girlfriends

The last film in Éric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series. Blanche has moved to a new town; she likes her job and has no friends. She meets Léa in the canteen and they grow close quickly. Léa has a boyfriend, Fabien. Blanche likes a man called Alexandre. The rest consists entirely of substitutions. Who likes whom, who says what to whom, who speaks on whose behalf. Nobody speaks directly and everyone misreads everyone else's intentions. The idea is that these people do not know their own feelings; the relationships come not from feeling but from setting and opportunity. The location is part of the narrative: the film takes place in a planned new town built outside Paris in the 1980s. Everything is new, orderly and a little empty; so are the relationships. Rohmer's method is the same again: long conversations, a camera that does not intervene, and a plot built on small misunderstandings. Emmanuelle Chaulet plays Blanche and Sophie Renoir plays Léa. An enjoyable close to the series for anyone who likes French cinema and films built on talk. For a viewer wanting incident, there is only talking across the film and the tension comes entirely from who says what.