The Aviator's Wife
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Movie Reviews of The Aviator's Wife
Movie Review: Essential French cinema: Rohmer's 'La femmme de l'aviateur.'
Summary: 5 Stars
Éric Rohmer (1920) first challenged traditional Hollywood cinema with his French New Wave cycle of films, "Six Moral Tales," which he completed in 1972 before commencing another six-film cycle, "Comedies and Proverbs," each based on a different proverb.
Based on the proverb, "on ne saurait penser à rien" ("it is impossible to think about nothing"), The Aviator's Wife (La femmme de l'aviateur) (1981) is the first in Rohmer's insightful "Comedies & Proverbs" film series. It tells the story of an obsessively-jealous young man, Francois (Phillippe Marlaud), who believes his lover, Anne (Marie Rivière), is cheating on him with her airline-pilot ex, Christian (Mathieu Carrière). Christian, we learn, has visited Anne early one morning only to tell her he is returning to his wife. While wandering the streets of Paris, Francois encounters a 15-year-old girl, Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury), and they decide to follow Christian, who is with a blonde woman. Rich in relationship dialogue, like many of Rohmer's films, the Aviator's Wife illustrates how the course of love never did run smooth, particularly for his young Parisian characters. Hopefully Criterion will remaster Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" series, and then offer it as a boxed collection similar its "Six Moral Tales" boxed set.
G. Merritt
Movie Review: Rohmer knows relationships
Summary: 4 Stars
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 cliche 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.
Movie Review: Great eg. of psychologically subjective storytelling
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Movie Review: Typical Rohmer fare
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a typical Rohmer film, talky, dealing mostly about relationships between men and women. It was the first Rohmer film I saw, and it's not among his best, but is a very good introduction to his work (I think he has proven a much better director when he has tried to put his idiosyncratic take on historical subjects, such as in Perceval, Triple Agent and The Lady and the Duke). In this film, Philippe Marlaud (a young actor who unfortunately died a few months after this film was released in a freak accident) is jealous that his somewhat older girlfriend (Marie Riviere, a Rohmer regular) has been meeting against her previous flame, the titular aviator. (The aviator's wife, incidentally, does not appear in the film except in a photograph). He has catch the aviator coming out of Riviere's apartment, so he sets himself to discreetly follow him. For that endeavor, he accidentally enlists a very quirky high school student (Anne Laure Meury). The heart of the film occurs when they follow the aviator and a blond woman they believe is his wife. As it would later turn out, things are not what they appear. You can enjoy this movie for its dialogue, and for the performances, but it is also true that there is a certain question of what was Rohmer's point in this movie (which happens in a lot in his movies). Some critics bring up great philosophical questions, but even if this is true, most people won't catch them.Movie Review: WOMEN ARE HARD TO UNDERSTAND
Summary: 4 Stars
THE AVIATOR'S WIFE is not a movie about the wife of an aviator nor about a love story in the air. In fact, we'll just admire that lucky woman on a photography during a few seconds in Eric Rohmer's first movie of the "comedies and proverbs" serie. But she really has, in the Rohmer's way of thinking, the main role of the movie. She gets pregnant, forcing her husband, a pilot, to make a choice between her and his 25 years old mistress, Anne, the main character of the movie, played by Marie Rivière who has been present now in 6 Eric Rohmer's movies.Christian's decision is an emotional shock for Anne who is loved by François, a night-shift employee. The action of THE AVIATOR'S WIFE, if one may call "action" the discussions between characters composing a Rohmer's movie, starts here. And lasts one day. At the end of the day, one character will be emotionally wounded for life. And it won't be the aviator's wife.
If you love psychological movies with dialogs extremely well written and everyday life characters, then THE AVIATOR'S WIFE is definitively the movie for you. If not, unless you're a curious movie lover, skip it.
Winstar Home Video, as always, hasn't cleaned at all the master, so the image quality is below-average but it's not so important after all in an Eric Rohmer's movie.
A DVD that will make you feel smarter.