Suzanne’s Career

Bertrand is a medical student. His friend Guillaume is confident and thinks he knows how to talk to women. They meet Suzanne in a café. Guillaume takes up with her, spends her money and speaks of her with contempt behind her back. Bertrand sees it and says nothing; he too looks down on her and at the same time likes her. Bertrand is the narrator and it is he who tells it. Éric Rohmer writes and directs. It is the second of Rohmer's Moral Tales, a set of six films in which a male narrator each time tries to explain his own behaviour and each time gives himself away. It is short, about fifty five minutes, made very cheaply on sixteen millimetre. The idea is the unreliability of the narrator. Bertrand presents himself as decent and principled; the viewer sees what he actually does. Suzanne is at the centre, and by the end the narrative passes into her control; what the two men said about her turns out to be wrong. Rohmer's manner is already established: ordinary conversation, cafés, student rooms and nothing happening. Who it is for: viewers who like the French new wave and films built on talk. Who it is not for: nothing happens, the technical quality is rough, and the narrator's tone is deliberately irritating.