Thoughts rather than actions
spending time in Rohmer’s world
I don’t even know which Éric Rohmer film is my favourite.
Maybe My Night at Maud’s, Nadja in Paris, or Love in the Afternoon? I’m not really sure — and in my mind, they blur together a little bit. Not in a bad way. When I’m in the mood for Rohmer, I’m not really looking for a particular story or film. I’m looking for that mood itself.
Rohmer said he wanted to look at “thoughts rather than actions”, dealing “less with what people do than what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.”
Conversations wander, ideas surface and recede, characters drift toward decisions — or avoid them entirely. There is drama, but it happens softly, quietly.
It makes me think of something François Truffaut once said about Jean-Luc Godard:
"Godard makes two or three movies a year, because he works like a painter. For him, what counts is not a single movie, but the work he has done during a certain artistic period."
Rohmer often made series of films — Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, Tales of the Four Seasons — as if each were part of a larger sketchbook.
His films are often set in and around Paris — especially in the ’80s and ’90s — and frequently involve people in offices, or in summer apartments, or on trips to the countryside or the sea.
People entangled in romance, captured in a New Wave/slice of life style, with dialogue casual enough to feel accidentally recorded.
The clothes, the rooms, the light. The rhythm of conversation. The moral hesitations of characters. The fluid blending of documentary and fiction techniques.
This is what draws me into Rohmer’s world: the style itself.
It’s a style I sometimes revisit through Gloria Massana’s feed or other Instagram profiles — tiny visual echoes of that world.
Rohmer’s places and spaces are never just backdrops. They shape the way his characters move, the way they talk, the way they reflect. A rented summer house. A Parisian office. A friend’s beach cottage. These aren’t just locations; they’re mental spaces. They make room for thinking, for talking, for hesitating.
It’s a place to be. And now, when the ’80s and ’90s feel increasingly soaked in nostalgia, it’s also a comfort.
I find myself noticing shirts, socks, colours, interiors, cars that look “Rohmer-esque“.
Maybe I’m also connecting to a nostalgia from my own childhood—the styles and colours and spaces of the ’80s and ’90s?
These films invite you to spend time in them. And I find I need a little visit regularly.
To inhabit them.
To think, rather than act.
