Bennett Glace looks at the proto-wife guys of Rohmer’s Moral Tales and their approaches to the blurry boundaries of relationships

More than two years after the term wife guy first entered the online lexicon, Amanda Hess addressed the archetype and everything that makes him so fascinating while obviously deserving of (at least) scrutiny and (quite often) scorn. “The wife guy is interesting precisely because he heightens the many contrasts of modern hetero masculinity.” He’s also suspicious, Hess writes, “because he appears to be using his devotion to his wife for personal gain.” With the help of diaristic posts and artfully composed portraits, he has found a way to reframe retrograde attitudes as enlightened, mainstream tastes as exceptional, and infantile behavior as mature. All he had to do was get married and log on.

Released decades before smartphones or social media, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales offer a showcase for some of the same qualities Hess and innumerable others have observed in famous, dubious wife guys. Even the bachelors among the cycle’s protagonists exemplify many of the attitudes, tastes, and behaviors that separate ‘the husband’ from the ‘wife guy.’ Without the means to build digital brands and pen social media missives, Rohmer’s wife guys settle for narration and philosophical conversation. They nevertheless rival any dedicated poster for sheer quantity of words. Without options for literally monetizing their relationships, they benefit from the appearance of devotion in more abstract ways. The protagonists’ infatuations, engagements, and marriages serve as a personal reminder that they are on the right side of a moral line. Safely on this side, they can justify — to the viewer, their peers, and themselves — all manner of behavior while collecting the social plaudits that come with making a responsible choice of partner and settling down. Rohmer’s characters differ from familiar wife guys, however, in at least one way. As Hess writes, today’s wife guys view marriage “less as the fulfillment of a social contract and more as a kind of personal achievement.” The protagonists of each Moral Tale — single, engaged, or married — know it’s always both. 

Though Rohmer’s prolific output would include two additional cycles of thematically linked tales, and his films have been called a genre all their own, he would never again follow such a strict formula as in The Six Moral Tales. Each film offers a variation on what’s effectively the same story, a sort of marriage plot. Taken or single, his leading men tend to view relationships as identities unto themselves and marriage as a distinctly moral gesture — by their own definitions, at least. Each protagonist begins his respective Tale committed to a woman, often a distant object of idealized affection. He becomes distracted or separated from the first woman, feels tempted by at least one other, and briefly toes (or crosses) the line of impropriety before returning to the first woman. In Rohmer’s words, “there is always a moment when the character has to make a decision of a moral nature, however high or low that ‘morality’ may be.” Rather than causing them to question their steadfastness, these moments of crisis, like the preceding infidelities and near-infidelities, typically serve to reemphasize the protagonist’s feelings of devotion and moral correctness. This is the paradox at the heart of each film in the sextet, the essential contrast of moral, Rohmerian masculinity. 

The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963) establishes the narrative formula that each subsequent Tale will roughly adhere to. More importantly, it creates the mold for the ‘moralistic’ protagonists to come and the rhetorical style they’ll employ. The short focuses on an unnamed law student (Barbet Schroeder) who becomes infatuated with the tall, blonde Sylvie (Michèle Girardon) after they repeatedly cross paths. Once they’ve finally spoken, Sylvie suddenly disappears from her usual spots. The crestfallen narrator soon makes a habit of visiting a corner bakery for cookies, all the while wondering if Sylvie is sick, dead, or, worst of all, married. He gradually begins to flirt with the titular clerk, Jackie (Claudine Soubrier), and his narration reveals a sense of self-justification and delusion that will echo throughout the Tales to follow. It is the bakery girl, he insists, who is fixated on him. It’s only to remind himself of Sylvie’s superiority that he pretends to flirt at all. “Yes, it was because of Sylvie that I accepted the advances . . . of the bakery girl.” He begins to see the pseudo-courtship as a way of indirectly punishing the wayward Sylvie while proving his devotion. Then, just as suddenly as she disappeared, Sylvie appears once more and diverts his attention away from a date with the bakery girl. Our protagonist’s closing narration reveals that they married within the year and also seems to tacitly confirm his assertion that choosing Sylvie over Jackie was “ultimately a moral [decision].” 

In Suzanne’s Career (1963), our traditionally moralistic narrator, Bertrand (Philippe Beuzen), watches disapprovingly as the womanizing Guillaume (Christian Charrière) toys with the affections of a string of women including Suzanne (Catherine Sée). The independent title character quickly finds herself the target of Bertrand’s incel-esque resentment. Her evident (to him) lack of self-respect makes her an unsuitable partner even for an acquaintance; he sets his eyes on Sophie (Diane Wilkinson) instead. In a reversal of the first Tale’s ending, Suzanne finds a better romantic outcome than Bertrand. Though he and Sophie are finally together, the relationship is falling apart. Suzanne, on the other hand, has proven Bertrand wrong and gotten engaged. He brings his narration to a close, remarking, “This girl for whom I’d only managed a kind of shameful pity, was beating us all to the finish line, and showing us to be the children we were.” 

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Bertrand’s unhappy fate is echoed in the conclusion of La Collectionneuse (1967), the fourth Tale officially and the third in terms of production and release date. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) heads out for a five-week vacation at the start of the film, leaving on uncertain terms with his fiancée and longing for relaxation alongside an old friend, Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle). Unfortunately, a stranger is waiting in their villa. Haydée (Haydée Politoff) once slept with another friend of theirs, who owns the villa, and now she brings a new guy there most nights. This offends Adrien’s morals, dubious principles given dubious credibility thanks to his engagement and comparative maturity. He concludes that “collecting [men],” as Haydee does, “is opposite to purity.” Like the rest of the Moral Tales’ protagonists he plays mind games while wondering at the plots and plans of his conquests, presenting himself as the unwitting victim of manipulation through his voiceover. Almost as soon as Adrien abandons his principles and propositions Haydée, he’s interrupted by two younger men and leaves in a childish huff. He can’t bear “the emptiness and solitude” of the villa and abandons his vacation almost immediately. 

The cycle’s masterpiece, My Night at Maud’s (1969), opens, like its first installment, on a moment of instant infatuation that turns to obsession and truncated courtship. Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) sees Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) across the aisles at mass and the devout Catholic knows they’ve got to marry. A remarkably chaste night in bed with Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced friend of a friend, can’t shake him from this conviction. Another chance encounter with Françoise the next day finds him bold enough to introduce himself and, before long, he’s spending the night in her apartment. Five years later, they’re married and raising a son. The couple is on a beach vacation at the film’s close when a run-in with Maud brings that night uneasily back into each character’s minds for just a moment.¹ 

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Rohmer remains on holiday for the fifth and most scandalous Moral Tale, Claire’s Knee (1970). Jérôme (​​Jean-Claude Brialy) has embarked on one last trip to Lake Annecy before getting married to Lucinde, his partner of six years. There, in a decidedly Rohmerian twist of fate, he encounters Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an ex-lover. Jérôme immediately makes it clear that they won’t be rekindling their relationship, promising, “I don’t look at women anymore. I’m getting married.” He sounds much different once he’s met Laura (Béatrice Romand) and her older step-sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). Consistent flirtation with both teenagers, he insists, only reifies his wife guy bonafides. The very fact of being engaged, having sustained a six-year relationship and brought it to its logical conclusion, gives Jérôme permission to not only remark on Claire’s relationship and Laura’s adolescent notions of romance, but to intervene in the most lecherous ways possible. Hell, it practically demands such behavior. As he explains to Aurora, “If I kept away from women… or even if I avoid their advances, then my love for Lucinde would seem to me a duty rather than a pleasure.” He expresses an interest in removing all “will” from his dealings as a way of proving he and Lucinde are bound by the fated necessity of a moral outcome. His justification features yet more redefined terms when he explains his final “good deed” to Aurora as “an act of pure will.” Attempting to sabotage Claire’s relationship and finally stroking her knee in mock consolation, he argues, “couldn’t be more moral.” Jérôme believes he has affirmed his love for Lucinde by curing himself of his fixation on Claire and also helped steer the girl toward a more suitable partner — someone like him perhaps. The final shot lets the viewer know the experience meant much more to Jérôme than it did to Claire. 

Fittingly, Rohmer’s most interesting exploration of the wife guy and his mindset comes from the one Moral Tale — 1972’s Love in the Afternoon — focused on a married man, a man for whom being a husband has not changed his identity but defined and arguably subsumed it. Though he’s many years older and has acquired the trappings of maturity (a wife, a child, a job), Frédéric (Bernard Verley) often resembles the unnamed student of the first Moral Tale. Throughout the film, Frédéric seizes every chance to reframe caddish behavior — which evolves from glances to gropes — as an affirmation of both his wife’s beauty and his undying love for her. “For me, love is an adventure,” he remarks late in the film, “for my wife too.” He expects we’ll take his word for the second half of the statement, but he’s proven the first part true many times over already.

During the film’s prologue, Frédéric sounds more listless. If love is an adventure, marriage is most definitely the opposite. In the “oppressive” suburbs, Frédéric wonders why exactly Hélène (Françoise Verley) first impressed him above all other women and laments that they never go out anymore. He compensates for an inability to rate Hélène against other women by feeling a comparable sense of affection for every one of them. When his business partner admits to infidelity in the form of consistent flirting, Frédéric’s voiceover grows especially dour. “If there’s one thing I’m incapable of now it’s flirting with a girl,” he says, “I have no proposition to make. Yet, I feel marriage closes me in, cuts me off and I want to escape.” That snippet of monologue soundtracks a passionate embrace between a young couple in a café whom Frédéric watches from a nearby table. Such voyeuristic episodes are at the heart of his affection for the city; they enable him to take part in innumerable love affairs every day. This desire to live many lives at once and maximize sensation is in keeping with his preference of reading several books at once. Frédéric’s rhapsodizing over the women of Paris begs the question as to whether he’s really so dejected at all. Silent flirtation not only strengthens the appeal of the city, but, if Frédéric is to be believed, strengthens his bond with his wife. “It doesn’t estrange me from Hélène, quite the contrary,” he assures the viewer, “these passing beauties are merely an extension of my wife’s beauty.” Despite his earlier intimations, it’s clear marriage has not so much closed a door as opened countless windows. He continues, “when I hold Helene in my arms I hold all women.” Hélène “ensures the world’s beauty” and marrying her invites him to enjoy that beauty without trepidation.

Frédéric’s adventures include a recurring fantasy, one that grows more vivid and inescapable with each day and brings him closer to truly holding every woman. It’s a fantasy that becomes as beloved a part of his daily routine as reading a book on the subway or taking a late lunch. In what’s easily the cycle’s most playful sequence, Frédéric imagines what life would be like with a magic talisman capable of “destroying free will” and making almost every passing woman his. He tests the talisman’s powers on six actresses from previous Moral Tales. To Frédéric, they’re embodiments of specific qualities that might otherwise make a woman inaccessible (they’re “accompanied,” “busy,” etc.). To the viewer, they can’t help but look like Maud, Françoise, Haydée, Aurora, Claire, and Laura. Their sudden appearance places Frédéric within a — forgive me — Rohmerian shared universe, a tradition of wife guys that encourages any experienced viewer to regard him with skepticism. 

It may as well be magic of a similar sort when Chloé (Zouzou) suddenly appears in Frédéric’s office. Her reputation precedes her and she reenters Frédéric’s life with the same sense of shared history trailing her as all those actresses we’ve just reencountered. She once led an old mutual friend to attempt suicide and, crucially, once spent a night pretending to be Frédéric’s partner. Within minutes, their first conversation not only reveals a fraught emotional history, but underlines that marriage and perceived marriageability have more to do with class than morality. Chloé remarks that she’d have settled down if she “had the means.” Instead, she’s left unsuccessfully asking Frédéric for a job. Frédéric later sounds like he’s seen a Rohmer movie or two when he notes, “once you run into someone there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll meet again soon after.” He says this shortly after he and Hélène encounter Chloé while out shopping and it proves a gross underestimation. Chloé, much to the obvious amusement of Frédéric’s secretaries, becomes a fixture in his life. That is, until she suddenly disappears — just as Frédéric had begun to worry he was being taken advantage of. When she appears again she is “unrecognizable” and Frédéric admits to “need[ing her] more and more,” suggesting he is only himself in her presence. Overbearing love for Hélène has apparently stymied his ability to speak candidly and show affection. “I take Hélène too seriously to be serious with her,” he declares, “With her, I act like a kid… a kind of natural modesty has developed that prevents us from revealing our innermost feelings.” Delivered remarkably close to Chloé’s face, it’s an unconvincing rationale. As viewers, we’ve heard Frédéric’s innermost feelings and gleaned enough to intuit how readily he’ll offer them up. Next, he reassures himself with the line about love being an adventure and Chloé disappears yet again. Frédéric reveals his ire through narration that sounds eerily similar to the words of his forebears, “She was obliging me to be jealous.” When Chloé reannounces herself at last it precedes news of Frédéric and Hélène’s new child (and the start of the film’s second and final section) by mere moments. 

Upon her second return, Chloé declares an explicit interest in seducing Frédéric. Their conversations grow more charged, leading Frédéric to ask, “We make a nice couple don’t we?” and even propose a kind of marriage. When Chloé responds incredulously, he doubles down, asking, “you never dream of living two lives at once… in a complete and perfect way?” Suddenly, he’s cast into a new mollifying role, forced to assure Chloé that she isn’t wasting time on him. He can only partially commit. When they finally share a passionate kiss, cinematographer Nestor Almendros keeps their mouths out of frame. “Listen,” Frédéric says upon turning away from their kiss, “I have to tell you.“ Chloé interrupts him and leads him out of frame before he finishes the sentence. Later, the couple comes even closer to infidelity in the basement of Chloé’s employer. In a see-through slip, Chloé welcomes Frédéric’s caresses before finally attempting to codify their relationship. “I don’t believe in friendship,” she says, “I’m in love with you.” While imagination is a suitable substitute for regular companionship, she wants him to bear her child. He asks, predictably, “What would I tell my wife?” 

The film’s final sequence reunites Frederic and Hélène in an embrace Armond White regards as a marital re-consummation and calls “the consistent key to all the Moral Tales.” Today, White’s reputation for mapping his own politics onto films and finding culture war talking points everywhere precedes him. It’s part of why his reviews still make occasional waves and why he’ll probably never get a gig like a Criterion essay again.² The conclusion of “Marriage, Rohmer-Style,” White’s 2006 accompanying essay for Love in the Afternoon, provides an illustrative case study in how blinkered a fundamentally Conservative critical lens can be. It’s quite often thrilling to read White’s takedowns of self-satisfied Hollywood slop. At his best, he can still prove that good taste and, perhaps more importantly, disdain for bad taste, can unite cinephiles across the political spectrum. It’s unexpectedly jarring to read his praise for a beloved film when that praise not only evinces his fundamentalist outlook but also totally misses what you love so much about the film and the five Tales preceding it. 

If this final sequence is, as White seems to contend, in part “an argument for marriage,” that’s only because it’s filtered through Frédéric’s self-justifying perspective. There’s no voiceover, but it’s easy to imagine Frédéric, newly secure in the sanctity of his marital vows, making this case himself. What he does say, out loud to Hélène, is a near-confession that sounds like a conscious transition from wife guy back to husband. He never promises to be faithful; that would come too close to revealing all his near-infidelities. What he acknowledges instead is that he has failed to take a genuine interest in his wife, that he has put more energy into talking and thinking about marriage than living it. “I feel guilty,” he says, “because I never talk to you or confide in you, but I talk endlessly to people I barely know.” Frédéric has talked about Hélène a lot (enough for Chloé to poke fun and ask him to stop), but the conversations have done nothing to characterize her, nor are they meant to. They’re simply reminders that Frédéric has a spouse and that he’s drawn a definite moral line between himself and Chloé and other unmarrieds. The subsequent exchange summarizes The Moral Tales’ purpose in a much different sense than White believes. It confirms Frédéric as the apotheosis of the Rohmerian Male and more the culmination of an ongoing cycle than the final stage in an evolutionary process. White winds up inadvertently sounding a little like Frédéric in his self-affirming analysis. Frédéric argues that everything he sees is a reflection of his wife’s beauty and everything he does is to serve the glorification of that beauty. It’s a desperate argument, one Frédéric himself cannot possibly believe or expect the viewer to. White shows a similar grasping desire to spot evidence of Rohmer’s Conservatism and a comparably liberal definition of what qualifies. He overlooks six film’s worth of evidence to serve his preferred reading and more confidently lay claim to Rohmer as a right-leaning kindred spirit. 

To read the ending as totally unironic is to take the wife guy at his word, to consume his posts with a straight face, and champion him as a paragon of positive masculinity. Love in the Afternoon’s ending is no more an argument for marriage than any of the Tales preceding it because, despite his age, Frédéric is no less a boy than Bertrand and no more a model of morality than Barbet Schroder’s unnamed narrator. He decides to leave Chloé’s apartment after catching a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. With his shirt over his head, he half-resembles the improvised character he played for his infant son earlier in the film. It’s a disarming reminder of his obligations at home, but it could just as easily trigger memories of flirtatious shopkeepers, a naked au pair, or any number of women on the street and in cafes. Whereas married life has invited inappropriate behavior and imbued every encounter with erotic possibility, full-on infidelity threatens to ruin the fun altogether. 

After consummating his one-sided, semi-adulterous affair in Claire’s Knee, Jérôme expresses a sense of intense satisfaction to Aurora, “It’s as if I’d had [Claire]. I’m fulfilled.” The feeling of acting on only a compartmentalized kind of desire offers the dual satisfaction of having transgressed and avoided transgression at once. Frédéric appears to achieve a similar sense of near-orgasmic satisfaction at least three times: stroking Chloe’s lower back when he first comes to visit the second of her two dreary apartments, running his hands along her side while she tries on dresses, and finally toweling her off after a shower. The sight of Chloé in bed apparently takes things too far. The sensuousness of each preceding sequence encourages us to recognize how dubious Frédéric’s moral line ultimately is. Our read on Frédéric’s final overture depends largely on whether or not we believe one particular sentence: “I don’t like afternoons.” Every other Moral Tale’s title references the specific woman its protagonist finds morally confounding. Love in the Afternoon instead suggests the moral gambit inherent in living out an entire chunk of the day and, implicitly, reminds viewers of one of Chloé’s last lines, “You’ll be unfaithful one day, and not necessarily with me.”

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1.  The final shot watches the happy family from an ironic distance and makes seemingly deliberate homage to a contemporaneous tale of marital strife, Agnès Varda’s La Bonheur (1965). We’re not only left believing that Maud may reenter Jean-Louis’ life again one day and continue the cycle of moral reckoning, but that the film itself is part of a broader metatextual cycle. In echoing Varda, Rohmer suggests the callousness of her François (who marries his mistress with almost comic speed after his wife’s suicide) is a common quality among such supposedly dedicated family men and that happy domestic scenes like these, at least in on-screen France, are often the direct result of heartbreak and deceit.
2.  White, easily the best-known Conservative film critic (perhaps of all time), must have seemed a natural fit to write on Rohmer. In spite of his acclaim, Rohmer’s reputation is complicated by his Conservatism, most obviously evidenced in his Catholic faith and the royalist views that alienated him from his contemporaries. His death in 2010 inspired a write-up in The National Review which has employed White for years.