Conte d'hiver – Sacrife in winter

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales revolve around male-female dynamics and everything that comes with them—eroticism, love, friendship, religion, philosophy—all viewed from the male perspective. In his Four Seasons films, Rohmer explores the same themes (don’t all artists ultimately have one fundamental theme?), but this time from the female perspective.

Conte d’hiver (A Winter’s Tale) is one of the four films: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. At the center of the story is Félicie, a typical Rohmer woman—attractive in an everyday way. What matters most is her sharp gaze, sparkling, elegant, intelligent, strong, and challenging. We begin in summer, during a holiday for Félicie, where she falls in love with Charles—not just a fleeting vacation romance. She feels, deep in her bones and in her loins, that this is true love, a great love—the kind of love that has started wars, toppled kingdoms, and led to murder. But all vacations must come to an end: hurriedly, at the station, she scribbles down her address and hands it to him.

Unfortunately for her, in a moment of absentmindedness, she gives him the wrong address. That might seem far-fetched, but not long ago, I had to give someone my address and accidentally gave my old one. And sometimes, I even get confused about my current PIN code. In any case: she has given him the wrong address.

Five years later, Félicie now has a five-year-old daughter (1+1=2), works as a hairdresser in a salon in Paris, and has two lovers—something that Rohmer’s protagonists often seem to have. Maxence, her boss, an older man, handsome, charming, confident. And Loïc, a sweet (too sweet?) young man who works in a bookstore and knows everything about Pascal, Victor Hugo, or Shakespeare, but little about life—at least, according to Félicie. As if they are opposites. When she moves to Nevers with Maxence, she tells him, "You don’t have enough books to fill the shelves." Loïc, on the other hand, has nothing but books. He lives through ideas. At one point, she says that if she were to tell Loïc she loved him, he would respond with a quote from a philosopher.

She cannot choose between the two men. They represent different qualities—intelligence, appearance, security—but above all, they represent the absence of Charles.

Sartre writes that Nothingness can be more present than what is. Suppose, he says, you are meeting Pierre at a café. You arrive, hang up your coat, order coffee, and Pierre is not there yet. Then everything that is present exists in the light of Pierre’s absence. His absence defines the entire presence.

That is how Félicie feels with both men—she constantly senses Charles' absence. But she makes it even harder for herself: with Loïc, she also feels the absence of Maxence, and vice versa. There is, however, a hierarchy to this: yes, she misses one when she is with the other, but the all-encompassing absence is that of Charles. He is her great love. Choosing one of the two men before her would, in any case, mean settling for a plan B—because life demands it—leading a shadow life.

Not that this is a bad thing. They are kind men, they adore her, they promise her the world. Loïc reads her heart, is gentle, understands her, and offers her a world of culture. Maxence is more decisive, sometimes to the point of being difficult, but he provides her with security and strength. And yet: one is not dominant enough, the other too dominant.

There are two key moments of realization for Félicie. When she decides—or rather, passively goes along with Maxence’s decision—to move with him to Nevers, her little daughter takes her into a church to see the Christmas nativity scene (the story unfolds in the last week of December). There, she experiences something that could be called an insight—a knowledge that lies beyond reason. Plato calls it Nous. Reason is necessary, but ultimately, there is something else, something that happens to us, something we cannot control, lead, or determine—only accompany. Like a restaurant owner who can open the door, set up the terrace, and place the menu outside, but whether customers come—that is beyond his control. Likewise, insight is not something we can summon at will.

As Félicie sits in the church—unlike Loïc, she is not religious—this insight comes to her. It is about Charles’ absence. It becomes clear that she must leave Maxence. Out of fear of being alone, she briefly returns to Loïc, playing with the idea—and he lets her play with it too much. Rohmer’s women may be strong, but this man, at least, is not. Anyway. She toys with the idea of finding safety with him. Until they go to see a Shakespeare play, A Winter’s Tale. There, she has her second realization, again tied to faith: she must be with no one.

Then comes the film’s deepest scene. Up to this point, I have referenced philosophy quite a bit—it might seem pretentious, and perhaps it is—but Rohmer himself does the same. Félicie’s insight aligns with Pascal and Plato, but ultimately, in a completely Kierkegaardian way (though he is never explicitly mentioned). In essence: Félicie realizes she must let go of both men, entirely. That staying with either of them would be pointless. In doing so, she deprives herself of any chance of ever finding Charles again. But, Loïc protests, you don’t know if you will ever run into him again in a city like Paris? He was supposed to leave for the United States! That doesn’t matter, Félicie responds, that’s not the point. The point is that I can no longer do this, and by letting go, I honor my love for Charles: whether he returns or not, it doesn’t matter.

Kierkegaard speaks, broadly, of three kinds of sacrifice:

1. The aesthetic sacrifice, which realizes the infinite within the infinite.

2. The ethical sacrifice, which realizes the finite within the finite.

3. The religious sacrifice, which realizes the infinite within the finite.

For the first, Kierkegaard uses the example of a peasant boy who is in love with a princess. He does not dare to confess his love to her, unconvinced that it would ever succeed, so he decides instead to write poems about her, to dream of her—in short, to make love real in his imagination. The infinite within the infinite.

For the second, the Danish philosopher gives the example of Agamemnon: on his way to Troy, a violent storm threatens his ship. A Greek goddess descends and tells him that she will stop the storm on the condition that Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to the gods. The war is more important than anything, so he agrees: Iphigenia is (almost) sacrificed. In the end, she does not have to die—it was about his willingness to offer her. But the key point is this: he sacrifices his daughter knowing what he will receive in return—a calm sea. The finite within the finite.

Then there is the third sacrifice—the religious sacrifice. The example here is Abraham, from Genesis 22. After years of waiting, he has finally been granted his son, Isaac, and then God asks him to sacrifice him. Why? Abraham does not know. He receives nothing in return, has no rational explanation, no expectations—there is only the sacrifice, nothing more. And yet, he does it. And at the very moment he raises the knife (and, according to Kierkegaard, effectively performs the sacrifice), he is stopped—Isaac no longer needs to be sacrificed. But from that moment on, Isaac belongs to God, a new kind of relationship is formed, and through him, a people will emerge as numerous as the stars in the sky. But Abraham did not know this in advance. Here, the infinite (God, so vast that He is infinite) is realized within the finite (this world, through Isaac).

Félicie enacts the sacrifice of the infinite. She gives up the safe men with whom she could have built a life. She does not know if this will bring Charles back—that is not the point. She is true to her heart, and that is all she can do. Whether love (which, like freedom, is an infinite concept according to Kierkegaard—beyond human control) will come to her, she does not know. There is no deal, no tit for tat. Félicie moves toward the infinite.

Philosophy and religion are never far from Rohmer’s work. In My Night at Maud’s, the film with which this one shares certain similarities (Pascal, Catholicism, and the single mother), the characters are also constantly engaged in discussion. Rohmer’s people are just like us: they act, reflect on their actions, and then analyze their reflections on those actions. Sometimes, they do this to deceive themselves, to avoid having to act at all—but they are characters who think. That is something that happens too rarely in films.

Someone else who does this is Woody Allen, though his characters are ultimately driven by neuroses and abstract ideas. With Rohmer, it is deeper—they live as we do, and they think about it.

What stands out—here and in all his films—is the absolute honesty of Rohmer’s characters. Félicie never holds back. The men know about Charles, the men know about each other, the men know where her heart truly lies. And they accept it. Because that is often the case in Rohmer’s world: people are honest with one another, but the real question is whether they can be honest with themselves. And in the end, isn’t that one of the most fundamental questions of all? Are we honest with ourselves? Can we truly understand who we are?

Just like Félicie: she can spend hours overthinking, analyzing what she should do, but she only knows when the realization strikes her in the church. She understands herself—through something outside of herself. If it is true, as Augustine says, that God is deeper than my deepest depths and higher than my highest heights, then self-knowledge cannot come only from looking inward. Because He—again, Augustine—knows me better than I know myself, loves me more than I can ever love myself, and sometimes, if we are fortunate, He shares a piece of that knowledge with us—through what we might call a religious experience, or a sudden moment of insight. Rohmer, as a Catholic—perhaps not devout, but still Catholic—seems to understand this, and in doing so, subtly challenges the modern faith in psychotherapy. Talking and thinking are all well and good, but ultimately, something else happens.

As I write, I wonder if I am making Félicie into something she is not. Is she just a romantic, someone who believes in naïve, vacation love, in a love that remains perfect precisely because it never had to face reality? Is she simply constructing love in her imagination, trapped in a youthful fantasy, failing to realize that if Charles does return, their love too will be filled with difficulties, frustrations, petty arguments, and meaningless conflicts? Asako I & II explores this idea. And perhaps she is guilty of that too. We all idealize love. And real love, in its true form, challenges us. But intuitively, I feel that Félicie is more than that. That she is too intelligent to be a victim of her own dreaming. And in the end, maybe the dream itself does not matter. What is clear, at least, is that Maxence and Loïc are not real love—neither in the grandeur of love, the kind of love that inspires a thousand roses and a million poems, nor in the lived-in, everyday love—the kind of love that means knowing how to carry one another.

Winter is the sixth Eric Rohmer film I have seen—he kept making films until 2007!—and it is, once again, a masterpiece. Watching one of his films feels like time has been suspended, as if I am moving through France in any decade, driving along narrow roads, bearing witness to utterly real people, with utterly real jobs, and utterly real dilemmas. A film does not have to do this, but no one teaches me more about love, about life, and—yes—that damned God than Rohmer.