Remembering French Director Éric Rohmer’s Cinema of Observation and Misinterpretation

Éric Rohmer’s films often seem, at first glance, like stories of small stakes—conversations in cafés, leisurely afternoons, minor misunderstandings. But beneath their calm surfaces lies a filmmaker obsessed with the act of looking: how we watch others, how we misinterpret them, and how easily our perceptions harden into narratives. The preoccupation feels uncannily contemporary. In an age when our interactions are constantly observed, recorded, and interpreted, Rohmer’s attention to the ethics of perception resonates more sharply than ever. His cinema asks a question that feels newly urgent: what does it mean to truly see another person in a world where everyone is always watching? Across films like The Aviator’s Wife (1981), Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987), and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987), Rohmer returns to this question again and again, tracing how attention becomes both an ethical act and a source of profound misunderstanding.

This tension is already alive in The Aviator’s Wife, where a single ambiguous moment becomes the seed of an entire emotional conspiracy. François glimpses his girlfriend walking with an older man—nothing more—and suddenly he is consumed by interpretation. He becomes a roving observer, trailing strangers through Paris in hopes of uncovering a truth he can’t articulate. Rohmer’s camera follows him with a wry, patient curiosity. We see each detail that François latches onto, but we also sense how flimsy his conclusions are and how deeply he wants the world to confirm his anxieties. In a different director’s hands, this might become a thriller. Rohmer turns it into a study of how perception bends under the weight of desire. It’s not just that François misreads what he sees, but that he needs to misread it, because the alternative would leave him without a story.

Where The Aviator’s Wife is taut and restless, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle shifts the texture of attention into something more expansive and tender. Across four episodes, the film maps the evolving friendship of two young women whose ways of seeing could not be more different. Reinette watches the world with a clear, almost moralistic intensity; Mirabelle’s gaze is softer, more tolerant of human imperfection. Their debates over a rude shopkeeper, a cyclist’s impatience, or the meaning of silence are not trivial quarrels but glimpses into their ethical compasses. Rohmer shows how perception becomes a way of navigating the world— we can choose to see others generously or judgementally, and we can treat attention as a form of care or as a mechanism for critique. In this film, the act of looking is inseparable from character itself. 

Then, Boyfriends and Girlfriends turns attention into a social choreography—one built on glances, micro-gestures, and fleeting signals. Here, Rohmer’s characters interpret and misinterpret each other with breathtaking confidence. A glance held a moment too long becomes evidence of attraction; a small shift in posture becomes cause for speculation. The film understands how desire slips through these small cracks of perception, and how often we mistake what we wish to see for what is actually there. Rohmer orchestrates these misreadings with near-musical precision, revealing how fragile our relationships become when the meanings we extract from others are built on incomplete or imagined cues. 

Across all three films, Rohmer exposes the instability of perception with extraordinary delicacy. His characters live inside the stories they craft from partial information, and those stories, no matter how inaccurate, feel more real to them than any objective truth. In Rohmer’s universe, to look at someone is always to risk misunderstanding them. But the ethical question he poses is not whether misreading is wrong (it is, but it’s also inevitable); rather, it is whether we are aware of the limits of our vision. His cinema urges a humility that feels increasingly rare.

This is where Rohmer speaks most directly to our present moment. We now live in a culture structured around visibility, where our impressions of others often come from curated images, out-of-context clips, or digital traces. We construct narratives from fragments and mistake them for clarity. Like François chasing a mystery that may not exist, we are quick to interpret, quick to assume, and slow to question our own certainty. Rohmer anticipated this terrain long before it became our reality. His films show how looking can connect but also distort, how attention can be a gesture of understanding or an act of projection.

To return to Rohmer today is to encounter a rare deliberateness. He suggests that attention requires patience, that perception demands generosity, that to see someone clearly is to accept that some part of them will always remain unknowable. In a world saturated with overexposed social dynamics, Rohmer’s cinema offers a gentler invitation: to look more carefully, to interpret more slowly, and to allow others the freedom to exist beyond the stories we invent about them. 

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The Aviator's Wife (1981)

Éric Rohmer’s breezy, witty film traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Reinette and Mirabelle become instant friends upon meeting in the first of four vignettes, and become roommates in Paris. Throughout the remaining stories, they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city.

 

In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” Éric Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the outskirts of Paris to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”). The buttoned-up Blanche and the free-spirited Lea are tempted by each other’s love interests, testing both their friendship and their understanding of matters of the heart.