Rohmer’s Poetics of Placelessness

Abstract

The characters in L’’Ami de mon amie (1987), the final film of Eric Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes, live in Cergy-Pointoise, one of France’s New Towns, planned urban developments designed to accommodate population booms outside of Paris. In the film’s opening scenes, Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet), a young woman who works for the cultural affairs arm of the local city hall, meets Léa (Sophie Renoir), a student of computer sciences, in a cafeteria. A few days after their first meeting, the two women spend an evening at Blanche’s apartment in a well-known, visually striking residential building of Cergy-Pointoise: the Belvedere St. Christophe.¹ When the fictional Blanche occupies this actual building, it is, like the town itself, very new; only a handful of residents walk about the building’s extensive grounds, and the landscaping has not appeared. Like the town in which this film is set, this is a space, a residence, on the verge of completion. And like many of the settings in Rohmer’s films, those spaces in progress inhabited by the characters in L’’Ami de mon amie reflect and often determine their psyches.