La Carriere de Suzanne (1963) - by Faro

Who is Suzanne? She is weak. She is slighted, rejected, and disrespected by her two male companions. They take her money, they speak disparagingly of her, and she just accepts it all with a smile.

Who is Suzanne? She is strong. She makes her own choices, and does so with no concern about the opinions of others. She, for her own reasons, enjoys the rude & childish behavior of the two boys she engages with during this film; probably because she knows that their immature actions and reactions stem from their fascination with her. She spends and gives money freely because it holds no power over her, as we learn from a rare and pivotal soliloquy that she gives near the end of the film. And after all is said and done with these two boys, she just goes out with a smile and gets someone new.

Suzanne is the centerpiece, the one who understands what she is for herself and in relation to others, and thus understands her life.

The little spark of genius in this film is that even though Suzanne is the main purpose and focus of the film, she does not get the honor of speaking the voice-over narration. Instead the internal monologue voice-over, which is a critical Rohmer ingredient to his goal of blending film and text, is supplied by the jealous and judgmental Bertrand. The conflicted and uncertain Bertrand, who disapproves of his friend Guillame’s treatment of Suzanne but ends up treating her the same way… we often hate the people that we secretly idolize, and vice versa… and he disapproves of Suzanne till the final moments of the film when he realizes that he and Guillame have just been extras in her story, Suzanne’s Career.

Her story, but his words… a clever inversion that mocks the two boys’ selfish and misogynistic behavior toward Suzanne, but also acts as a subtle commentary on the over-arching formal structure of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Rohmer already knows that each movie will center primarily upon the private ethical rationalizing of male protagonists who are struggling with how to interact with women, and I believe that Bertrand’s moment of awareness at the end of this second film shows what this structure can reveal to us about ourselves, regardless of specific gender dynamics. The audience’s shifting perceptual awareness of Suzanne, through the short-sighted words of Bertrand, reminds us that Rohmer’s structural approach to these simple narratives of love and loss can create the same social blindness that many of us experience all our lives… lost in the murky clouds of our own solipsistic thoughts, we only occasionally peer outward and remember that everyone else is engaged in the same Story of the Self, and everyone thinks that their story is the only Story.