The strangest scene

This is a ridiculously underappreciated and unknown jewel of a movie. It stands alone in Eric Rohmer's filmography as his sole German language movie. According to an interview of Eric Rohmer conducted by well-known friend and director Barbet Schroeder (and available in the Six Contes Moraux boxset), the script apparently corresponds to the integral text (in 60 pp.) of a well-known short story by Heinrich von Kleist (1808), which is one of the most extreme examples of German romanticism in XIXth century literature. The synopsis, which I won’t give away of course, here, is both as simple as they come, and as complex as Eric Rohmer knows to render them, with his unequaled ability to depict the minutiae of the human soul with the infinite patience, precision and pure sense of wonder of an entomologist. However, despite Rohmer’s claims, the film does not describe all the elements found in the short story, or at least, not always in a fully intelligible manner at first glance, at least.

The example I will give is a scene which I had found rather disconcerting the first time I watched the movie. Now, after a second viewing, not having read the short story (but I managed to find it), I was even more destabilized by that scene, so I decided to look into the original short story to find out what the deal was. The scene happens not long before the conclusion of the movie, and shows the father, completely overcome by bliss and joy from having finally understood that his daughter had always told the truth from the very beginning of the chain events triggered by the infamous rape (or a nocturnal insemination by an incubus?) - o so mysterious! She was completely unaware of being raped by the culprit, as she had drunk a poppy infusion (or is it laudanum?). In that scene, we then see the Marquise’s father holding his daughter like he would do with a mistress or an adoring young wife, and kissing her on the mouth like he would do … with a mistress or an adoring, etc. etc. Yes, French kissing her would be a good way to describe it. And on top of this, all of this is happening while the Colonel’s wife - yes, the Marquise’s mother! just to make sure one portrays the scene as vividly as possible – is standing right next to them, crying tears of joy too. A surreal hyper-mega-romantic portrait of paternal love for a daughter? Or a slightly muted, but unequivocal description of an incestuous relationship? At first, as I said, I was so surprised that I kept watching the movie, hoping that the meaning of that scene would become clearer, or perhaps even revealed, who knows? Rohmer likes to provoke the viewer’s curiosity, but he never cheats. And since this brilliant director does everything with a purpose however insignificant it might appear at first, I wanted very much to understand the meaning and/or purpose of that scene.

As far as I could tell, judging only the surface of things, this is the only scene where the viewer is confronted with any sign of a possible illegitimate relationship in that family. When I saw the movie for a second time, being aware in advance of the scene that was to come, I was even more convinced that no confusion is possible: the father has a thing for his daughter the Marquise… And more than the idea of a rape - which in the original novel, is famously and literally described … in a dash: “Then--the officer,…”- it was the presentation of Colonel G. as a lecherous father burning of a carnal passion for his own daughter which made the short story so shocking when first published.

So Rohmer, using the short story synopsis as the very script – “la nouvelle dans son entier” (the whole short story), he once said about it himself- for his movie, needed to convey that most delicate aspect of the inner family relationships in such a way that it would not attract too much attention, as the focus of the film is to portray how the Marquise’s life suddenly takes new, unexpected directions after a once common felony that used to be a normal part of any battle’s spoils, i.e. rape, has been committed completely unbeknownst to her. If Rohmer had introduced even just a single scene whose first purpose had been the incestuous behavior of the father towards the Marquise, the movie’s angle would have been changed completely and would have probably made this train derail into a bottomless abyss. Instead, I realized just now, Rohmer simply chooses to present, out of the blue completely, a scene where, as absurd and incongruous it may look at this point, the Colonel G./father osculates his daughter the Marquise in a gesture supposed in principle to properly show her his fatherly love, but that definitely looks more like a solid Frenching session. And again, what makes the scene even more hallucinatory is the presence of the mutter, whose intense devotion to both her husband and her daughter gives an incredible force to her character and to the story, right next to her two most beloved human beings on this Earth united in an incestuous embrace!

Sadly, Rohmer will never answer the question I’m asking: was this depiction without an explanation meant to convey anything more than a deviant trait in the father’s behavior? Like perhaps something that might have explained why the father was so adamantly furious at his daughter having been engrossed by the Russian Count, up to the point that he ostracized her completely, leaving her with an annual rent but made otherwise a pariah of her? The reaction of a noble and loving father, or that of a jealous, incestuous lecher, a lover-father? One thing is for sure: the obvious fact that incest still being such a taboo – and this was 1976, after all!- Rohmer managed to use the short story as a storyline with his usual rigor and respect for the source material while safeguarding his film from censors, a brilliant tour de force in this case! Indeed, when watching the film in 2015, one wonders how the scene I have been discussing made it through the censors with a PG rating despite its clear-cut depiction of “deviant” smooching of between dad and his angel, not to mention that this was wrapped in an all-encompassing cloak of post-rape silence... Well, I was old enough in 1976 to be able to tell IMdB forum readers that the general attitude towards sex was still very, very loose: AIDS would become a staple in conversations and in the bedroom only 6-7 years later. Moreover, it had already been almost a decade that the Hays Code had vanished like the dodo, so that a climate of relative tolerance had installed in the minds of the public. In fact, looking back, it’s only after the decadent ‘80s, that cases of sexual abuse of children by their parents slowly became something seemingly much more common than anybody had ever imagined until then, so that one may safely assume that incest, just like my own perception of it at the time La Marquise d’O was released in movie theaters, was something very rare and generally occurring more frequently in isolated pockets of civilization with small gene pools such as in remote regions of the Appalachians, (Deliverance , everybody?:)). Therefore, to wrap up the topic, it’s fascinating after all to realize how much and how rapidly sex has changed and evolved in the collective mind. Is there anybody here who would think that a global, highly publicized release of La Marquise d’O (“il est permis de rêver!”)  without deleting any scene would even be considered as feasible in 2015? Well, although this movie has no nudity at all (ridiculously, still THE Big Taboo today in 2015), its dramatic focus on rape (again, never shown!) and its depiction of incest in a short final surprise scene right before the end would walk on a tight rope by today’s standards… Ah! What an interesting sociological test that would be!

It’s those small but incredibly effective stipples depicting one disconcerting human situation or action after another, and connected by brilliant, more or less elevated dialogues between more or less brilliant, but constantly fascinating, never boring characters, that make the Rohmerian art of showing mankind in its full reality. Reality might sound and look depressing, uninteresting, ugly or simply boring in anybody else’s hands, but Rohmer had this unmistakable ability to film reality not only according to the nouvelle vague’s dogma, never fretting about using exteriors whether by choice or by necessity, with such aesthetics that reality became a sublime art when filmed by his care.