Another lump of evidence in the thickening dossier on Eric Rohmer as a Dirty Old Man. A dysfunctional dirty old man, if you will; a menace to no one except maybe the thrill-seeking filmgoer; just an urbane and courtly old gent who likes to surround himself with slim young pretties, so that near the end of his seventh decade he might listen indulgently to their bright and confident chatter, watch them a little wistfully in the pursuit of next to nothing: changing a bicycle tire, for a start, and in the process giving a glimpse of bare knee or upper breast as they hunker over the punctured pneu, exercising a "superbly" unmuscled and spaghetti-thin arm on a portable air pump. Ah, c'est charmant, n'est-ce pas? Rohmer's sixteenth feature film, neither an installment of his Moral Tales nor one of his Comedies and Proverbs, but a completely separate and independent entity, is just enough less contrived, just enough less protracted (chopped up as it is into four bite-sized anecdotes), just enough less philosophizing and moralizing, that it emerges cumulatively as that much more pleasurable than usual. Or more to the point: that much more unobstructed a girl-watcher's lookout. The main snag in this regard is that it was made by Rohmer in his periodic tightwad mood, when he shoots in 16mm and blows up to 35, with the result that the image seems to be dusted over with a layer of grit. An old ogler should take better care to keep his bifocals clean. Joëlle Miquel, Jessica Forde. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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