Suzanne's Career brings us right back into the same bourgeois urban milieu where we left off our brief visit with The Bakery Girl of Monceau. Both stories unfold in downtown Paris (a more knowledgeable commentator than I would probably bristle at my lumping the locations together like that, since I'm sure each neighborhood has its own distinctive subculture and ambience) and they each offer realistic portrayals of the thoughts and feelings of young men pursuing young women at that time of life when the consequences of offhand comments, playful seductions and little white lies are often amplified, with long-term effects. In Suzanne's Career, we track two men, Bertrand and Guillaume, who each take turns making their moves on Suzanne, a somewhat plain working class girl trying to make her way through university. Bertrand and Guillaume come across as more privileged, and Guillaume in particular must come from old and/or abundant money, since his rudeness and arrogance would otherwise be repulsive enough to cost him most of his friendships. Each in their own way take a similarly condescending, perhaps slightly misogynistic attitude toward Suzanne, who spends more of her meager funds on the two men than she really ought, yielding just their dismissive contempt as a return on her investment. She could turn out to be quite a sad little victim, but as circumstances develop, she shows herself to be more shrewd and capable at looking out for her own interests than first impressions lead us to think.
In terms of action, adventure, suspense or memorable visual compositions, Suzanne's Career doesn't have much going for it, though Rohmer's relaxed familiarity with the Parisian locations generates a lot of atmospheric appeal. The real delight in this film is in just tracking how sharply Rohmer captures the whims and rivalries that drive each character through a series of offensive and defensive postures in regard to people they regard as best friends or lovers one day, and untrustworthy objects of derision the next. The story is at once as mundane and as fascinating as most anything we see going on in the love lives of those around us, and most likely at some point within our own experience as well.
A conventional director might have taken both stories (which together amount to just a little over 80 minutes of screen time), sexed them up a bit and edited them into one film, featuring a lead- and a sub-plot that take viewers into an amusing new wave romp through the romantic escapades of glamorous young Parisians. Perhaps if Eric Rohmer had taken this more commercial approach, he might have been able to put together a proposal that won the trust of a studio willing to get in on the nouvelle vague action back in 1963. Rohmer's peers - Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and others - were all busy carving out their respective niches in the cinema scene of that time, but even though Rohmer was not lacking in ideas for a truly novel approach to filmmaking that would eventually win him an audience and enduring admiration, these two films languished in obscurity, unreleased and largely unknown until he would make a splash with the third of his Six Moral Tales, La collectionneuse four years later, in 1967. (So it's gonna be awhile before I work my way through the list to that one...)
Still, I can't help but respect his tenacity and the clarity of purpose that moved him to see these two short films through to completion just as is. I'm sure we could have just as easily lived with "Five Moral Tales" if he'd chosen to mix his plots up a bit, but the singular focus on a strictly limited triad of personalities served him well in creating the archetype of the films to follow in this series. What's more, he'd already written them up as short stories, and he adhered quite closely to the text, especially in this film, forging a strong link between his cinematic and literary conceptions of these prototypical young adult characters and the relational dilemmas they were in the process of sorting out.
Given that The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne's Career were early works in the career of a director who would continue to release highly regarded films well into the 2000s, a viewer can't be faulted for assuming that Rohmer was a young man himself as he focused his lens on French college students and their assorted erotic entanglements. But he was already in his early 40s by then. I suppose that Rohmer's late entry into filmmaking ultimately benefited from his life experience and years of disciplined critical thinking about film, philosophy, psychology and the subtler machinations of desire, self-pity, entitlement and resentment that drive so much of human behavior. As he patiently went about his work, refining his directorial techniques through various television projects and establishing connections with future collaborators who would bring impressive technical polish to subsequent films, Rohmer staked a claim to a vision of cinema that would eventually find its audience (along with the inevitable detractors and backlash that have to be endured by all artists who choose to follow an idiosyncratic path.)
For something a little different to finish things up, here's a clip from Suzanne's Career with an oddly effective musical overdub of a song titled "Suzanne" by former (and current?) Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval.
Next: Brakhage '63 (Mothlight)