The hedonist coed (Haydée Politoff) is first seen by the beachfront, the camera abstracts her in cubist analysis (midriff, shoulders, back of knees, neck); her defiant muteness is contrasted with the other sides of the triangle, the antiques dealer (Patrick Bauchau) and the avant-garde artist (Daniel Pommereulle), both given to prolix self-questioning. Eric Rohmer's canvas is the vacationing intellect, placing Bauchau face to face with the Mediterranean in an attempt to "take inactivity to a level never reached." Rousseau and Dalí come his way all the same, although the main challenge remains Politoff, the comely sexual collector sharing a St. Tropez villa with him and Pommereulle. The lout she came with is exiled but she stays for the potential conquests, her provocative indolence puts a dent on Bauchau's armor of distanced irony -- his curiosity inflamed under a coolly composed exterior, he proceeds in a succession of advances and retreats, working out a hypothesis. Rohmer's Moral Tales are structured by the gulf between self-image and reality, but the director understands the dangers of isolating the intellect from the rest of the world: Pommereulle's latest work is a paint can encrusted with blades, a guest contemplates it intently ("Thought surrounded (ouch!) by razors. I'm bleeding"). Rohmer and Nestor Almendros instead showcase the full sensuousness of the courtly style, countless different tones of sunlight and a virtuoso sound design of birds, crickets, the offscreen whoosh of a plane and, above all, the teasing timbre of desire and uncertainty rising out of a low-key wavelength. An ancient Chinese vase figures as a reminder of Rohmer's early study (with Chabrol) of Hitchcock's sundry objects, the gamine's meeting with an American client (Eugene Archer, an American critic) compresses Contempt in order to reveal Bauchau's "Machiavellian side." A translucent comedy of procrastination, exquisitely wrought as a progression of sifting seductions that bellies a cutting punchline, the moral victory that might be Pyrrhic. With Alain Jouffroy, Mijanou Bardot, and Annik Morice.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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