{"id":822077,"date":"2026-08-22T12:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T12:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/822077\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T12:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T12:22:10","slug":"embryonic-lost-novel-by-french-film-maker-eric-rohmer-is-republished-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/822077\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Embryonic\u2019: lost novel by French film-maker \u00c9ric Rohmer is republished | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the dog days of the second world war, 24-year-old Maurice Sch\u00e9rer wrote a tale of young lovers in prewar small-town France<\/a>. He described lazy August swims in the Marne River east of Paris. He wrote about age-gap affairs and semi-incestuous flirtations. Sch\u00e9rer gallantly used a nom de plume, Gilbert Cordier, to shield his Catholic family from scandal, but he needn\u2019t have bothered as his concerns were unfounded. The finished novel, \u00c9lisabeth, barely made a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Undeterred, Scherer adopted a second pseudonym \u2013 \u00c9ric Rohmer \u2013 and decided to try his luck as a film-maker instead.<\/p>\n

Now \u2013 eight decades on from its first publication, 16 years on from its author\u2019s death<\/a> \u2013 \u00c9lisabeth belatedly returns from the cold. Republished in an English-language translation by Aaron Kerner, Rohmer\u2019s book has been greeted with glowing reviews, hailed as a lost modernist classic and a crucial origin story for the award-winning director of Claire\u2019s Knee, The Green Ray and My Night at Maud\u2019s. \u201cIt would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar,\u201d wrote Richard Brody in the New Yorker. The fact that it\u2019s by Rohmer? That\u2019s the icing on the cake.<\/p>\n

The new edition of E\u0301lisabeth by \u00c9ric Rohmer. Photograph: McNally Editions<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the one hand, to be honest, the book is a footnote,\u201d says the novelist Andr\u00e9 Aciman, a longtime Rohmer fan who wrote the foreword to the new edition. \u201cBut it is also embryonic and full of Rohmerian moments. It takes on all the themes that will become more developed, complex and impactful in his films.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rohmer was working as a freelance journalist in Nazi-occupied Paris when he wrote \u00c9lisabeth, which follows a loose-knit group of dreamers in the pregnant summer of 1939. Stung by the book\u2019s failure, he moved on to film criticism and finally to directing, becoming an older member of a generation of French New Wave film-makers that included Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut. \u201cI didn\u2019t believe in literature any longer,\u201d he would later say. \u201cI felt its time had passed [and] that cinema had supplanted it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cinema, Aciman says, provided Rohmer with his natural home. Plot elements that feel formulaic in \u00c9lisabeth are more honest and lively in his films. \u201cThere is something in his work that has always captured me,\u201d he says. \u201cThe study of human behaviour and our unpredictable natures. Two people who are dying to sleep with each other but don\u2019t. That\u2019s probably why I project myself on to every character in every Rohmer film. I think, \u2018Oh my God, I could be this man or this woman. That\u2019s what I\u2019d do or say in that situation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The critic Adrian Martin, an expert on New Wave cinema, says that Rohmer\u2019s use of improvisation helped give his films a sense of freshness and freedom. \u201cHe shot with a very small crew, sometimes three or four people,\u201d Martin says. \u201cAnd what was important to him was the spontaneity of the actors and the dialogue. He didn\u2019t like to do multiple takes. He didn\u2019t even like to direct the actors very much. Sometimes he\u2019d be off in the next room while the scene was being shot. He\u2019d yell: \u2018Just do it!\u2019 and whatever the actors gave him was mostly what he wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

In person, by contrast, Rohmer remained private and secretive. Sometimes he claimed that he was born in Tulle and sometimes in Nancy; sometimes that his real name was Maurice and sometimes Jean-Marie. \u201cBasically he was always hiding his profession from his mother,\u201d Martin says. \u201cShe would have been ashamed and seen film-making as a bit of a dirty profession. His parents thought he was a teacher and that was seen as OK and respectable. But they never knew that he was writing about films and eventually directing them. It\u2019s mind-boggling to think of anyone doing that now. His whole adult life was a complete secret to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The missteps and confusions of footloose French youth\u2019 \u2026 \u00c9ric Rohmer\u2019s 1983 film Pauline \u00e0 la Plage. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Rohmer\u2019s best-loved works \u2013 Claire\u2019s Knee (1970), Pauline \u00e0 la Plage<\/a> (1983), the Tales of the Four Seasons (1990-1998) series \u2013 chiefly focus on the missteps and confusions of footloose French youth. His people are articulate and self-questioning, invariably to a fault. \u201cMy heroes, a little like Don Quixote, take themselves for characters in a novel,\u201d the director once said. \u201cBut perhaps there is no novel.\u201d The republished \u00c9lisabeth at least puts that notion to bed. Filled with sparky dialogue and crisp stage directions, it is the literary ancestor of Rohmer\u2019s arthouse filmography and as close to a screenplay as a novel can get.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing about Rohmer is that he dug his own field,\u201d Martin says. \u201cHe\u2019s constantly telling the same story, just with these little variations. It\u2019s always about friendship, love affairs, games of desire and flirtation. It\u2019s never simply a matter of one person loving another person. They\u2019re thinking: \u2018Do I want to love this person \u2013 and why?\u2019 They\u2019re hyper-rationalising all the time. That\u2019s the same field that \u00c9lisabeth is digging. The basic dynamic is already there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a great novel,\u201d Martin adds. \u201cIt might even be too much to call it a wellspring. But it\u2019s still fascinating. It\u2019s the seeds, germ and kernel of everything he went on to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the dog days of the second world war, 24-year-old Maurice Sch\u00e9rer wrote a tale of young lovers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-822077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}