Six Moral Tales by Eric Rohmer

In the early 1960s, Eric Rohmer (1920-2010), now hailed as one of the most influential directors in the world, began to adapt into films the series of short stories he had slowly been writing during the previous decade, enigmatically called The Moral Tales. Each tale is loosely inspired by F. W. Murnau’s film Sunrise, in which a man, committed to one woman, is tempted by another. Yet none of these tales are ever simple, chiding, or moralizing—“It would be nonsense to believe that I am proposing a moral of some kind,” Rohmer once said of them. Each tale holds a sharply distinctive willingness to expose their characters’ insecurities and pretensions, having their characters learn often punishing lessons. Thrillingly intelligent portraits of self-centered, articulate, often foolish men and the wise and powerful women they long for, these tales are staged with offhand visual imagination and filled with electrifying, high-stakes verbal showdowns. The filming of The Six Moral Tales presents entirely new challenges to how romantic relationships are portrayed on film: as intellectually developed stories playing out their characters’ complicated debates and indecisions.