Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987)

Thanks for the memories!

hyped garbage

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Finding the first title in Rohmer's loose film series to be the most interesting one out of the group,I got set to watch the final in the series,with the hope that Rohmer would wrap things up in a similar fashion.The plot:Starting a new life for herself, Blanche meets a woman called Lea,whose care-free nature soon leads to them becoming friends.Catching a glimpse of him,Blanche goes to ask a handsome guy called Alexandre out,but is disappointed to learn that he is already going out with an arty women called Adrienne.Feeling down over being the only one that is single,Blanche soon finds the tide to change.View on the film:Bringing the curtain down on the series,writer/director Éric Rohmer & cinematographer Bernard Lutic collide the two major visual motifs of the movies via all the interior scenes being pulled back to their barest, breached white form,and the great outdoors being drizzled with floral colours and a breezy atmosphere. Continuing his theme of the bourgeoisie,the screenplay by Rohmer takes a refreshingly comedic slant,which while never outrageously hilarious does inject the title with a dry wit that gives the criss-crossing romances between Blanche and Lea a charming zest,as they tell each other comedies and proverbs.

Eric Rohmer was more than one of the directors who formed the French New Wave. He also wrote a lot of surveys and articles about cinema, especially about his favorite director, F.W. Murnau, out who he wrote his dissertation. His first article that got published in the year 1948 was titled (directly translated:) "Film, art of space." In the year 1962 Eric Rohmer published his academic survey called: "The construction of space in Murnau's Faust." While reading about his surveys and articles, it's no surprise that space in Rohmer's films seems to be as important as the plot.Eric Rohmer's career started with problems, and it wasn't going forward. But when he got off the ground, he proceeded more purposefully than anyone. When the new wave era ended in 1964, the directors of it started eventually finding their own path. Eric Rohmer started his series of six film, The Moral Tales and continued with Comedies & Proverbs in the 1980's. L'ami de mon amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) is sixth and the last one in the series. It builds around the proverb: "My friends' friends are my friends." The comical situations emerge between two women who unintentionally swap boyfriends.Two women suddenly meet while having lunch. One of the two women is Blanche, she is a skinny, uptight young woman, who is still searching for herself. The other is Lea, she's self-confident and a very feminine person. They both have something going on with men, so the main characters have their opponents; shy Fabien and a true player, Alexandre.While trying to figure out the space of My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, I can't miss the futuristic city the characters live in. I got the feeling that Eric Rohmer isn't trying to tell a story of four specific people who live in France. To me he's telling about all the people living in these suburbs of Paris. The space of a futuristic city, the city full of postmodern architecture without any past. This theme of the milieu leads to rootlessness. The people of this city have no past, each of them like to analyze and talk about themselves. But none of them really know who they are.My Girlfriend's Boyfriend offered these kind of things for me. In addition to its intelligent narrative, it is full of hilarious comical situations. Eric Rohmer builds four very interesting characters which will take you on board."My friends' boyfriends are my boyfriends."

Spoilers herein.The two poles of my cinematic world are Greenaway and Rohmer. At the Greenaway end, the images are lush and overloaded. The story is deeply self-reflexive. Everything is saturated with intent. The world created is special, otherworldly.And then there is Rohmer. The story here is arbitrary, one might as well tour a zoo or go on a shopping trip. The images and actor's impression is wholly unremarkable, invisible by design. The camera is as unpretentious as possible, and with study, one can see some significant effort went into this apparent effortlessness. The whole point with Greenaway is to create a skin around his work with paths into the interior. The opposite is the case with Rohmer. He places his world squarely in the ordinary one you inhabit. Everything by its unremarkable nature points outward. All the meaning in this film comes not from the film, but from the world we live in with the film providing paths from itself to us.Rohmer is all about framing -- framing in such a way that the picture is ostensibly framed, but actually everything _but_ the film is framed. So we have films that are parts of cycles, larger sets. Each set refers to something that exists beyond art and life: proverbs or seasons or such. Not love or any of the normal bumpf that is all invented for the sake of ordinary art -- instead the pure, simple ordinary stuff of life. There is no one at all with the courage to do this but Rohmer. Jarmusch does it but only for irony. Tarkovsky did it but only by beginning with dream images.This is an intelligence that transcends ideas. Anyone who thinks this story has any content -- either sweet or profound -- is missing the point.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.

I am not a fan of Eric Rohmer. The pace of most of his films is very slow, they are full of dialogue, and often I react to his characters with a distinct desire to slap them in the face and shout "get a life!".However, this one is different, it is a real gem. Yes, the pace is slow, yes the film is loaded with dialogue, but these characters are believable. We see relationships develop, new ones arriving on the scene and old ones being broken up. The drama is the drama of real life, the characters are ordinary (perhaps a bit better looking than ordinary) young people living in a Parisian suburb, there are no extraordinary things happening to them, just ordinary things. While Rohmer's story is realistic, it is still pleasantly realistic. It is just as romantically heart-warming as, say, While You Were Sleeping, but it does not have to force us to suspend our disbelief.One piece of advice many people will fail to appreciate: if you are a non-French speaker, try to see this in a dubbed version, not a subtitled one! The dynamics and meaning of the dialogue in this film is much more important than the original sound, not to mention that subtitles could hardly keep up with this amount of dialogue.