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The Aviator's Wife More at IMDbPro »La femme de l'aviateur (original title)
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| Index | 11 reviews in total |
15 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Rohmer knows relationships, 30 August 2004
Author:
Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
In this bittersweet tale of disconnections and possibilities perhaps we
have the essence of the art of Eric Rohmer. If you have only one Rohmer
film to see, perhaps you ought to make it this one because it is so
very, very French, so interestingly talkative (one of Rohmer's
trademarks) and so very, very Rohmer.
The Aviator's wife, incidentally does not appear except in a
photograph, but that is all to the point. Everything is a bit off stage
in this intriguing drama: love especially is a bit off stage. And yet
how all the participants yearn.
Marie Riviere stars as Anne who is in love with the aviator. We catch
her just as she learns that he no longer wants her. He tells her that
his wife is pregnant and so he must return to her. Meanwhile, she is
being pestered by Francois (Philippe Marlaud) who is in love with her.
However he is a little too young and "clinging." Truly she is not
interested. It is a disconnection as far as she is concerned.
The heart of the film occurs when Francois is following the aviator and
the blond woman. Francois is obsessive and jealous. He follows
because...it isn't clear and he really doesn't know why except that
this is the man that Anne loves. As it happens while he is following
them he runs into a pretty fifteen-year-old (Lucie, played fetchingly
by Anne-Laure Meury) who imagines that he is following her. She turns
it into a game, and again we have a disconnection. She is fun and cute
and full of life, but he cannot really see her because he pines for
Anne. Meanwhile Anne of course is pining for the aviator.
Rohmer's intriguing little joke is about the aviator's wife. Who is she
and what is she like? We can only imagine. And this is right. The woman
imagines what the other woman is like, but never really knows unless
she meets her.
Maire Riviere is only passably pretty, but she has gorgeous limbs and
beautiful skin and a hypnotic way about her, which Rohmer accentuates
in the next to the last scene in her apartment with Francois. We follow
the talk between the two, of disconnection and off center
possibilities, of friends and lovers with whom things are tantalizingly
not exactly right and yet not tragically wrong. As we follow this talk
we see that Anne's heart is breaking or has broken--and all the while
we see her skin as Francois does. She wants to be touched, but not by
him. And then she allows him to touch her, but only in comforting
gestures, redirecting his hands away from amorous intent. And then she
goes out with a man in whom she really has no interest.
Such is life, one might say. Rohmer certainly thinks so.
One thing I love about Rohmer's films is that you cannot predict where
they will go. Another thing is his incredible attention to authentic
detail about how people talk and how they feel without cliché and
without any compromise with reality--Rohmer's reality of course, which
I find is very much like the reality that I have experienced.
See this for Eric Rohmer whose entre into the world of cinema is
substantial, original, and wonderfully evocative of what it is like to
live in the modern world with an emphasis on personal relationships and
love.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut
to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it
at Amazon!)
10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Thinking Rien, 29 August 2002
Author:
frankgaipa from Oakland, California
I could call this one of my favorite Rohmers, but there isn't one about
which I wouldn't say that. Somewhere I've read that Rohmer's male
characters are less perfectly, or maybe it's less caringly, drawn than
his female. Yet I don't think there's one whose mistakes, harms,
self-deceptions I haven't either fallen into or sidestepped one time or
another. "Aviator's Wife" flows to and then from a single easy-to-miss
but magically telling moment, worked by sprite of the park, Lucie, in
the post-park café across from the building into which the aviator has
temporarily disappeared. François nods off for a second or two. With a
touch on the cheek, Lucie wakes him, immediately, and tells him it's
been ten minutes. Circumstance and moment trap him into believing,
believing spontaneously like a babe, even though he hasn't believed a
word from his Anne all day. Up until the final reel, Rohmer seems to be
working to make us dislike Anne, even as our embarrassment for François
brings us close to hatred for him. Anne's tired from the start, weary
and wary of men who think they're in love. I was shocked that she's
only 25, just as I was that wise Lucie is only 15 (and that François is
as many years as he is past, say, 12). Even understanding the
self-interest and harmfulness of François' self-deception, it's hard
not to wince at Anne's defenses, however wise and justified they are.
Better to savor the funnily wise Lucie. For twenty-plus years until
this recent viewing, I remembered Lucie but could only picture Anne.
Anne in my memory: dark unruly hair, bony, going to or leaving a lonely
single bed, like a convalescent. I remembered her as having a cold, yet
she doesn't.
The film's proverb is "It's impossible to think about nothing." Long
ago in a language class, a language I never carried through with and
retain very little of, when the gruff prof challenged me, "Stop
hesitating!" I got up the nerve and the unlikely spontaneity to
complain understandably in the language, "I stop to think when I speak
English. This is normal for me. Why can't I hesitate in ________?"
"When you speak ________," he shot back without missing a beat, "don't
think!" François and, perhaps more justifiably, Anne dig their
respective holes because neither of them can manage not to think,
neither can successfully think "rien."
But Rohmer's never so simple, so expository. That moment in the café,
caught unthinking, François is deceived. Trivially, but deceived all
the same. Does that instant overturn the proverb? Don't know.
7 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Sleepwalker in a landscape of romantic artifice., 8 June 2004
Author:
philipdavies from United Kingdom
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The person of whom we know least is the aviator's woman. This is largely
because the emotional topology is neither simple nor relatively stable like
the triangular formula it first appears to be.
François is too matter-of-fact to go with the flow of this gestalt of
rapidly metamorphosing relationships. Like a latter-day Polyphemus, he
drowses dimly through a hazily-grasped landscape of romantic artifice, and
always fails to get the girl through the folly of an approach so direct as
to be lumbering. Because he is so ponderous, Lucie teases him, to relieve
her impatience.
François threatens the essentially gossamer-like dance of youthful romance –
the flirtatious touch-and-go of creatures as yet unburdened with any sense
of their mortality.
But he also burdens the older Anne with his stolid inability to hurry after
and keep company with her advancing sense of years and maturity. He lightly
observes to Lucy in the park that he is, chronologically, stuck exactly
midway between two women, but it is the formula and not its significance
which strikes him.
He sleepwalks across a wideawake Paris, from yesterday's literally exhausted
love, to the dawning of a new love at a temporal juncture which
unfortunately for him does not coincide with the pattern of his
shift-distorted days. In a tragic conclusion to this farce of an elementary
failure of communication, the student who must work his way through college
is shown as forever excluded from the smooth and easy path set before the
privileged children of the haut-bourgoisie. Indeed, there is a double
tragedy, as Anne still appears to be languishing in an at least emotionally
unresolved divorce, and yet age has put her asunder from François, thus
robbing both of their natural and mutual haven from those whose fortunate
background will ensure that everything will come to them as a matter of
course.
This is the dark side of Rohmer's generally more sunny world of gently
bittersweet dalliance: The film shows the point at which all the lightness
must become serious. The pilot and his woman – is she wife? sister?
mistress?professional associate? – seem to preside from an aloof and
unknowable distance, like Arcadian deities over the cruel twisting of human
destiny.Their inexplicable appearances and disappearances mirror the
faltering course of human affairs, which do leave most of us more-or-less in
the lurch.
There is a Mozartian harmony to this conception of how life produces not
only winners, but losers as well, yet losers who are not obviously the
wilful creators of their own fate. As a portrait of the apparently random
strokes of fortune, dealt by the endlessly absconding figure of the vaguely
heaven-located ‘aviator,' this film could even be said to breath the air of
Classical Greece ... were Rohmer not so conscious of the artifice as to
locate the impossible flirtation of Lucy and François in a park all of the
bucolic features of which are entirely artificial.
Amidst all the pretty lies, one thing is certain: Disillusionment.
Yet Rohmer seems to believe – as the subtitle of this film suggests – that
such a bleak world of conceptual emptiness would be literally unimaginable
for the artist, unsupportable for the creative intelligence.
Quintessentially French, it is the rational play of wit that satisfies and
expresses this cool, classical sensibility. Here, he deliberately
objectifies the limits of his own talent, or human-interest: It is an
admittedly delightful formula bounded on one side by the beautifully
illuminated world of the aquarium by Anne's bedside, and on the other by the
crystalline confection of the snow-shaker in François' nervously occupied
hand as she ‘freezes him out', but it is a formula, nonetheless, and can
only describe the imagined regions of those with the temporal luxury – the
time – to develop such a rareified sensibility.
Neither shiftworkers nor disappointed women – the one cruelly pressed for
time, the other by it - can luxuriate in that fundamentally aristocratic
sense of the infinite possibilities of self – the sense which gives to so
many of Rohmer's films their particular quality of timeless dalliance. This
is a game for kittenish teenage girls and their attentive swains, and it
presents them with no immediate consequences.
It is, in short, amidst those who are still young and therefore truly alive
that Rohmer wishes to remain. In this film he acknowledges the cruelty
implicit in the intuition that life ceases once consequence is encountered.
He has created a Garden of Eden in his delightful films of the delicate
blooming of relationships, but in ‘La femme de l'aviateur' he has
pre-figured the inevitable temporal fall of this first waking dream of those
young creatures who early stretch in the sun's first, kindly, rays, in
fields that seem made especially for their innocent sport.
The aviator's woman is like the rainbow's trajectory: The occasion of
charming speculations, which can only be pursued, but never satisfied. Don't
be misled by Rohmer's ‘documentary style.' He is a poet, not a realist. Or
rather, perhaps, he is the documentarist of the evanescent, the ephemeral –
like the green flash of sunset in his ‘Le rayon vert.'
Perhaps this director expresses that very French nostalgia for the ideal
aristocratic society of Romance – an impossible political Eden, therefore?
And a somewhat guilty pleasure, on the evidence of. ‘La femme de
l'aviateur.' Yet what sensual pleasure is there but eventually leaves us
sadder than we were?
Like that annual holiday which we dream of all the rest of the year, and
which figure prominently in Rohmer's films, or like that hoped-for holiday
romance undefiled by the unromantic intrusions of the daily grind, we are
glad to be indulged by the prospect of escape, even though we know perfectly
well that it will all come back to earth again with more or less of an
unpleasant bump. Unusually for Rohmer, in this instance we are made very
conscious of the disappointing nature of everyday reality during the course
of the film. This atypicality, wonderfully, rather strengthens the artistic
integrity and value of what the director wishes to do in the rest of his
oeuvre. Maybe nostalgia for our lost Edens is, after all, sufficiently
distinct from a defective grasp of reality to prevent our losing our heads...?
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Strong debut for Comedies and Proverbs, 15 November 2008
Author:
timmy_501 from United States
It's hard to explain what exactly is so appealing about the films of
Eric Rohmer. A plot summary of any of his films would surely make it
sound like a dull affair or possibly even a soapy melodrama. Rohmer's
films aren't about plot, however, one might even say they defy plot.
Instead of focusing on conventional narrative, Rohmer concentrates on
his characters. This is not to say that Rohmer chooses to show
extraordinary individuals; the strength of his characters is actually
in their ordinariness. His characters seem like people I really know or
at the very least like people I might encounter. These characters
aren't dumbed down or simplified to be more universal, either; each
seems like a uniquely realized person.
The Aviator's Wife is about Francois, a Parisian college student/mail
sorter and his relationships with his older girlfriend Anne (who he
suspects is cheating on him) and Lucie,a younger girl who picks him up
in the park. Throughout the film we come to know both the flaws and
strengths of these three characters, each of whom is curious (albeit
for very different reasons) about a certain aviator and his wife.
Francois is naive and clingy but very kind natured, Anne is strong but
cruel, and Lucie is cheery and intelligent but also dishonest and
coquettish.
The Aviator's Wife is the first of Rohmer's six "Comedies and Proverbs"
films. The proverb this time around is: "It is impossible to think
about nothing." Within the context of the film this seems to refer to
the inability of some of the characters to understand the significance
(or lack of significance) of the things they hear. This theme works
well enough but the film as a whole fails to be as captivating or as
interesting as the previous Rohmer films I've seen (those being Pauline
at the Beach and The Green Ray). This is especially apparent in the
bedroom scene near the end of the film which goes on too long. Still,
the comical ending was a fun surprise.
3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Great eg. of psychologically subjective storytelling, 7 January 2004
Author:
Abhijoy Gandhi from Philadelphia, USA
THE AVIATOR'S WIFE - Eric Rohmer / France 1981 (3.5 STARS)
15 December 2003: It is always difficult to get overtly excited about an
Eric Rohmer film or make any relative comparisons with conviction - Eric
Rohmer's works are almost like Jazz music, delicate in their appeal and
full
of irony, yet not given to the charts. The Aviator's Wife, the 1st in
Rohmer's series of Comedies & Proverbs is subtle like poetry by full of
the
irony of urban existence. Set in his hometown Paris (as most of his films
are), this is a film about a young woman's insecurity about growing old
lonely, and a young man's obsession with the slightly older woman.
Artfully
made with a color palette that seems to reflect the hues of the lives of
the
characters, the film is talkative yet reflective and insecure with a
certain
confidence.
. Mise-en-scene: The character's motivations are developed with
painstaking
detail in an attempt to build characters that we may grow to either love
or
loath, but irrespective respect as real people. I was drawn to the young
man's character in particular and to his singularly obsessive personality
even though he was gentle and carefree at first sight.
. The older woman was so typically stereo cast as idiosyncratic, intense
and
detached in a manner only the French can be. In the final scene one feel
for the boy when he discovers that the young girl he meets on the bus has
been feeding him all along, but before we have time to react, Rohmer makes
a
comic joke of the situation by spinning the movie into a loop so that we
end
up almost where we started, except that we've got a different man that the
protagonist is trailing this time around.
. The Cinematography, is bland, almost dogma like (way before the birth of
Dogma- this is 1981), and there is almost no emphasis at technique beyond
functionality. Yet sound is used to haunting effect, with ambient sound
playing a potent character. Whether this was because of poor on location
sound or whether this has been used as a stylistic element to enhance the
narrative is however difficult to tell.
a musical chair game for film character development, 25 November 2010
Author:
kickall from MilesEast
It's always fun watching Rohmer's heroes and heroins develop their
characters in a 90-min of story-telling.
The aviator Christian shows up talking for 5 minutes in the beginning,
and then he turns to just a subject that we all audience, including
François, have to know him from how Anne will describe him and how
Lucie will envision him.
The audience can only see aviator's wife once from a photo Anne posses,
but till we see it, including François, we learn all of our assumption
made from Lucie's smart guessing will need to be re-assumed otherwise.
The last five minutes of the movie indicates François will get himself
to be going after Lucie, for he is made believe Lucie may not seem as
straightforward as he felt. His role somehow imitates to Christian now.
So much fun with so minimal resources of moving making. Solute Eric.
4 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Marie Riviere--worth trying to avoid, 18 February 2004
Author:
Bob Taylor (bob998@sympatico.ca) from Canada
TFO, an Ontario network, has been showing Rohmer films in rotation for
some time. This one is new to me. A young man works the night shift at
the post office to finance his studies. His girl friend works days, so
their relationship is haphazard, to say the least. He believes she
cheated on him with an older man--the pilot--so he spies on the pilot
to find out more...
I can't find much to like about these people. Anne is neurotic and
manipulative, as well as a liar when it suits her, and it's obvious why
Francois loves her: he wants a mother-figure. Marie Riviere has always
been unpleasant to watch; here you want to slap her. Lucie is another
in a long line of sprightly teenage girls that Rohmer loves so much.
Anne-Laure Meury displays a lot of charm as she tries to get Francois
to talk about himself. Her acting provides the only moments of
freshness and openness in this story.
Rohmer has tried to make this film in the youthful style of the New
Wave, using 16mm fast film and portable cameras, and it works very well
in the greenery of the Buttes-Chaumont.
1 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Great eg. of psychologically subjective storytelling, 7 January 2004
Author:
Abhijoy Gandhi from Philadelphia, USA
THE AVIATOR'S WIFE - Eric Rohmer / France 1981 (3.5 STARS)
15 December 2003: It is always difficult to get overtly excited about an
Eric Rohmer film or make any relative comparisons with conviction - Eric
Rohmer's works are almost like Jazz music, delicate in their appeal and
full
of irony, yet not given to the charts. The Aviator's Wife, the 1st in
Rohmer's series of Comedies & Proverbs is subtle like poetry by full of
the
irony of urban existence. Set in his hometown Paris (as most of his films
are), this is a film about a young woman's insecurity about growing old
lonely, and a young man's obsession with the slightly older woman.
Artfully
made with a color palette that seems to reflect the hues of the lives of
the
characters, the film is talkative yet reflective and insecure with a
certain
confidence.
. Mise-en-scene: The character's motivations are developed with
painstaking
detail in an attempt to build characters that we may grow to either love
or
loath, but irrespective respect as real people. I was drawn to the young
man's character in particular and to his singularly obsessive personality
even though he was gentle and carefree at first sight.
. The older woman was so typically stereo cast as idiosyncratic, intense
and
detached in a manner only the French can be. In the final scene one feel
for the boy when he discovers that the young girl he meets on the bus has
been feeding him all along, but before we have time to react, Rohmer makes
a
comic joke of the situation by spinning the movie into a loop so that we
end
up almost where we started, except that we've got a different man that the
protagonist is trailing this time around.
. The Cinematography, is bland, almost dogma like (way before the birth of
Dogma- this is 1981), and there is almost no emphasis at technique beyond
functionality. Yet sound is used to haunting effect, with ambient sound
playing a potent character. Whether this was because of poor on location
sound or whether this has been used as a stylistic element to enhance the
narrative is however difficult to tell.
7 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Rohmer's best, 6 June 1999
Author:
Andres Salama from Buenos Aires, Argentina
A gem. I don't usually like Rohmer's films, but this one is wonderful, even though some may feel the plot is extremely slight. But the texture, the wonderful actors, the capture of the small details of life made this an unforgettable movie.
0 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Interesting but Light Rohmer, 27 January 2004
Author:
paur46 from United States
I love Rohmer's films. I just saw this one for the first time. It was fairly satisfying, deficient primarily because the lead actress was less interesting and appealing than most of Rohmer's women characters and actresses. I thought the movie might end with the lead male character falling asleep on screen for the fourth time during the film. But the presence and performance of the young actress Anne-Laure Meury redeems all. And, by the way, who is the wife of the aviator?
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