The great New Wave filmmaker, Éric Rohmer, has never proclaimed himself a genius. From Le Signe du lion (1962) to The Romance of Astrea and Céladon (2007), he developed highly unusual ways of working, which gave his films a unique quality in their apparent fragility: tape recordings of conversations with his cast, location recces and shoots on the sly, mixing fiction with documentary… This is an intimate piece of skilfully crafted work; he has set it up as if to create the illusion that the cinematic story came about by itself, through chance encounters. It is this Rohmeresque alchemy that is revealed by the documentary with its film clips, rare interviews he has given and previously unseen test shoots (sketches, retakes), but also with a few Rosebud moments hidden away in his childhood home in Correze. The intention was not to make a Rohmer biography, nor to find some secret or other in his life. His dual identity, clearly separating Éric Rohmer, the public man, from Maurice Schérer, the private one, could, however, invite such an approach. But a mysterious link exists between the two, which is intriguing and perhaps entails being revisited through film.

Pascale Bouhenic and Noël Herpe