The Aviator's Wife

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.