Suzanne's Career (1963, Eric Rohmer) (Patreon)

58/100

At 54 minutes, Moral Tale #2 falls into the tricky "featurette" zone, and it does rather feel as if Rohmer's still working out how to fashion a feature-length narrative from the sort of incident-light, personality-driven scenario he favored. In a more churlish mood, I might complain that he kills a bunch of time via the séance, forcing us to endure multiple stultifying runs through the alphabet. Mostly, though, it's the "twist" ending that creates a retroactive impression of the film unproductively ambling around en route to same. (Kinda like the hour-long Twilight Zone episodes, or The Usual Suspects.) Was quite surprised to find that the dynamic here prefigures In the Company of Men: alpha asshole and his subservient dweeby friend take dual advantage of a nice young woman, with Suzanne's ostensible weakness being a lack of self-respect rather than a physical...let's pretend it's still the '90s and just say disability, we're looking at it from the predators' perspective. My tolerance for characters who put up with constant negging ("If I had good taste, I wouldn't like you," Guillaume says at one point, sans any hint of playful teasing) is quite low, so Suzanne irked me almost as much as she irked Bertrand, and the way that this ultimately gets turned on its head comes across less as blinkered misapprehension than as Rohmer creating a dubious psychological profile in order to spring a trap (albeit likely on himself as much as on Bertrand and the viewer; all of these early films in particular feel highly self-critical). Individual scenes are strong, that goddamn Ouija table notwithstanding, but the overall sting-in-the-tail trajectory almost certainly would have fared better as a short, à la "The Bakery Girl of Monceau" (which I watched just beforehand—finally got to the first two Moral Tales long after the other four—and quite liked, sort of a dry run for The Aviator's Wife).