The tenor of Sax?

Boris Karloff, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Charles Brabin, 1942

Bernard Verley, Love in the Afternoon, Eric Rohmer, 1972

The occa­sion of the ongo­ing and entirely splen­did Film Society of Lincoln Center Eric Rohmer ret­ro­spect­ive inspires me to muse, a little bit, on how sort of inter­est­ing it is that a film­maker who chose one half of his pseud­onym in homage to the cre­at­or of Fu Manchu would betray very little of that writer­’s influ­ence in his own work. Or would he? Actually, not so much. At The Daily Notebook.

This retro, incid­ent­ally, affords me the oppor­tun­ity to plug in the scant holes in my exper­i­ence of the great film­maker­’s oeuvre; the oth­er night My Lovely Wife and I delighted in  1993’s The Tree, The Mayor, and the Mediatheque, an extremely droll polit­ic­al par­able fea­tur­ing a fant­ast­ic com­ple­ment of quint­es­sen­tially Rohmerean deli­ciously self-important and self-deluding char­ac­ters, includ­ing Pascal Greggory as the very well-meaning but almost impossibly con­des­cend­ing title may­or, Fabrice Luchini as a truc­u­lent shool­teach­er who becomes very exer­cised about the tree that the tit­u­lar media­theque threatens to uproot, and most hil­ari­ously, Arielle Dombasle as the may­or’s lov­er, a cheer­ful chatty whack job nov­el­ist. The char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion plays like such a dir­ect con­tinu­ation of Dombasle’s clue­less char­ac­ter from Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach that I had to check and make sure they did­n’t share the same name—they don’t. One of this char­ac­ter­’s best bits is when she yam­mers on to the may­or about the ety­mo­lo­gic­al ori­gins of the word “snob,” which is the same in French as it is in English: it derives, she says, from the Latin phrase “sine nobil­it­ate,” mean­ing “without nobil­ity,” which of course, she flat­ters her lov­er, he him­self can­not be. Her char­ac­ter being who she is, she is of course cit­ing a dis­cred­ited notion about the word, but she does it with all the con­fid­ence at her com­mand, which is not a little bit.  This made me laugh for a num­ber of reas­ons, one of them, I have to admit, being some intim­a­tions of snob­bery and quasi-noble ori­gins hav­ing been dir­ec­ted my way recently. But I digress. The film played its final screen­ing earli­er this week, and I do hope it comes around again, maybe on video, as it’s really a stitch.