The Aviator's Wife (1981, Eric Rohmer) (Patreon)

98/100

A film I adore both for what it is and for what it stubbornly isn't...which is marvelously strange, even paradoxical, since they're one and the same. My first viewing happened to be in 1995, a few months after Before Sunrise opened; while I'd thoroughly enjoyed Linklater's impromptu romance, it's this chance encounter on public transit and subsequent promenade that represents my dream scenario of meeting the love of my life. (Well, she'd be older than 15 in my dream. Though Anne-Laure Meury was 16 or 17 at the time, and looks 18 or 19.) Like so many classic onscreen relationships, François and Lucie's is lightly combative, its dynamic predicated on his utter obliviousness (due to keeping one eye on Christian at all times) and her teasing fascination with the ever-shifting rationale for his presence in the park. Rohmer's standard amalgam of airiness and prolixity gets infused here with a touch of screwball (manifested in Lucie's impulse to make mischief), while the narrative starts to anticipate Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet ("I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert," Lucie all but says at one point). The conventional version of this movie would see François gradually recognize, over the course of the day's spying from a distance, that his true soulmate is standing right next to him. That'd probably be one of my favorite films of all time.

Instead, Rohmer audaciously (in his casual, unassuming way) dismantles all of my movie-fueled hopes and assumptions, and somehow still crafts one of my favorite films of all time. The exhilarating sequence about which I've been raving proves to be a lengthy digression; we return to the toxic situation between François and Anne, already in progress, and it continues largely as if Lucie had never existed (though François does eventually mention her, prodded by Anne and his own inability to think of nothing, per the film's subtitle/proverb). Anne reassumes her previous status (established in the first half hour) as the film's most complex and contradictory character, while François reverts to being what Michael Showalter would later term "The Baxter"; they part on a note of deliberate irresolution, still ostensibly "together," but with Anne ducking François' parting kiss and preparing to go out on a date with someone else (who's reportedly "harmless," but could scarcely be more of a doormat than François himself). Furthermore, the source of all the mid-film intrigue involving Lucie is revealed to be utterly mundane, with the title character turning out to be the one person we never see (except in that photograph)—a cipher representing our collective willful ignorance about others. It's all oddly, thrillingly subversive, given the direction in which The Aviator's Wife had once appeared to swerve. And it's capped by one of those masterpiece-defining touches that defies my efforts to articulate the nature of its greatness: François writes Lucie (at Anne's urging) the précis she'd requested, goes to drop it off at her house, sees her kissing a colleague of his from work. Again, it's abundantly clear what would happen next in a conventional film. He'd throw the postcard away, signifying an opportunity lost/abandoned. That ending would certainly "play," but it wouldn't rattle my synapses like watching François—who handles mail as a part-time job; the film opens by chronicling the end of his shift at the post office—purchase a stamp from a street vendor and drop the postcard in the mail. If I knew why I find that so intensely, ineffably moving, I'd be a much better film critic, and probably a better person, too.