Words for a conversation: speech, doubt and faith in the films of Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve

Abstract

Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1996) are landmark studies that established the centrality of women’s experience in mid-twentieth century Hollywood’s imaginary and posed, against a backdrop of increasing sexual equality following women’s suffrage, deep ethical questions of recognition and non-recognition, desire and freedom, within the traditional American heterosexual couple. Cavell identified conversation as central to these films’ attempts to grapple with shifting forms of private intimacy and their relation to broader changes in the public sphere. In this article, the author demonstrates that Eric Rohmer and Mia Hansen-Løve deploy the Cavellian techniques of everyday language brought to vivid life within a naturalistic mise-en-scène to explore heterosexual coupling culture within changing French gender norms and roles. This allows their films to explore a specifically feminine subjectivity, bringing to the fore questions of self-reliance and doubt in a society which allows women legal and social freedom but still subjects them to patriarchal expectations. The article thus sheds light on why Rohmer and Hansen-Løve’s cinema makes such use of dialogue, its connection to a sympathetic interest in female becoming, and traces a new New Wave inheritance outside of Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism.