The Sign of Leo

The
Sign of Leo

Eric Rohmer's debut film, The Sign of
Leo, is very different from the films Rohmer would later
become known for. The director who would soon enough be acclaimed for
his philosophical examinations of love and morality, with protagonists
constantly talking, talking, talking, debuted with a film that contains
only traces of his later style. His protagonist, the transplanted
American Pierre Wesselrin (Jess Hahn), is not prone to self-analysis and
philosophical inquiry as later Rohmer heroes and heroines would almost
invariably be. Pierre is blustery and boisterous, a hard-living man
always on the edge of poverty, relying on the generosity of his friends
to keep him afloat as he stumbles through life, drinking and partying.
When he learns that he's acquired an inheritance from a rich aunt, he
arranges a lavish party to celebrate, liberally borrowing money and
uncaring that he's getting kicked out of his apartment, thinking he's
wonderfully lucky. But the inheritance doesn't come through after all,
and Pierre finds himself suddenly adrift in Paris, without a home, with
all his old friends either away or dodging him, as his constant need for
money begins to wear on them.

The film is aesthetically quite
distinct from Rohmer's later work. Its rough, realistic portrait of
Paris' streets seems descended from the work of Rohmer's idol Jean
Renoir, particularly the downtrodden hero, who's a more melancholy
variant on Renoir's Boudu. Much of the film is dedicated to following
Pierre as he wanders around Paris, trying to find friends, moving from
one hotel to the next, gradually losing or squandering all his
possessions, becoming increasingly desperate from one luckless day to
the next. Unlike in later films, when Rohmer would forsake non-diegetic
music, much of these wanderings are set to a constant soundtrack of
violin music, a mournful accompaniment to Pierre's desperation. For a
director who would later turn his attention almost exclusively to the
materially comfortable middle and upper classes and their romantic
travails, Rohmer here has a sharp eye for the details of poverty and
deprivation. The mostly dialogue-free scenes of Pierre on the streets
are very perceptively observed: Pierre watching as a pair of bums are
humiliated while begging at a café; Pierre listening in on the casual
chatter of people who don't have to worry about food or money in any
real way; Pierre trying to shoplift from a market and getting beaten up.
It's harrowing and stark, and has few parallels in Rohmer's later work;
the ostentatious mood-setting music is the opposite of what Rohmer
would strive for in later films, while the near-total lack of dialogue
is a stark contrast to Rohmer's later commitment to probing character
through what's said, and not said, in the midst of their inevitable
searches for love.

Love, of course, is far from Pierre's mind,
and his girlfriend Cathy (Jill Olivier) disappears from the film without
ceremony after the opening party segment. The film shows how luxuries
like love are stripped away when life is reduced to a certain baseline
level, where food, money and shelter are the primary concerns. Pierre's
disintegration is heartrending, and to some extent it's so affecting
precisely because it's contrasted against the usual Rohmerian milieu
glimpsed at the beginning of the film, in which love affairs are the
most important problems facing these characters. The party scene
provides the foundation for the rest of the film, for Pierre's fall.
He's a musician, playing the violin at the party but unable to complete
his composition, and the piece he plays here will be repeated throughout
the film, a motif that continually evokes the moment when Pierre
thought he was on top of the world, before it all came crashing down on
him. The music, though uncharacteristically direct in its emotional
shadings for Rohmer, is used inventively, appearing sporadically in the
diegesis as well as separately on the soundtrack. At the party, Rohmer's
New Wave colleague Jean-Luc Godard makes an appearance as a silent
partygoer who camps out next to the record player, obsessively looping a
record of classical music so it keeps playing the same segment over and
over again; his careful, ritualistic gestures have the quality of comic
mime. Later, music will appear on radios, or played by bums on the
street, and then be taken up on the soundtrack as Pierre makes his
lonely treks around Paris.


The soundtrack is also notable for the way it
makes dialogue an incidental element, fading in and out as Pierre
wanders silently by groups of chatting friends and young people out
enjoying the summer weather. Trapped in his misery and isolation, to
Pierre these people sound shallow and shrill in their happiness. At one
point, he mocks a pair of young girls derisively, mimicking their
excited talk with chirping noises. Several times, Pierre sits on a bench
and listens to the unconcerned talk of the people nearby, who can
afford to be cavalier about money and food, who have petty troubles like
bosses, medical benefits, travel expenses, where to go for vacation. He
passes two lovers by the riverside who are kissing and feeding one
another, and it looks decadent, sensual, lurid to the starved Pierre.

Finally,
after some time on the streets, Pierre takes up with another bum (Jean
Le Poulain), whose comic antics bring some life back into the film but
also further Pierre's humiliation, making him a street performer, an
unwilling sidekick in the bum's theatrical begging routine. The bum
wheels Pierre through the streets in a wheelbarrow and performs opera in
haphazard drag, and his revelry is like an absurd parody of Pierre's
enthusiasm at the beginning of the film, his celebration and sense of
play. Again, the film seems to be nodding to Michel Simon as Boudu, the
bold comic type, the clown, outrageous and confrontational, shameless in
his degeneracy.

The film goes through several distinct modes,
then, the styles of its disparate sections deliberately clashing against
one another: there's the broad introductory party, then the
increasingly stark and neorealist segment of Pierre wandering the
streets, which gives way to a more comic sensibility when the performing
bum is introduced. This sets the stage for the rather pat and
unconvincing ending, in which Pierre is abruptly whisked away from his
desolate life on the streets by the return of his friends Jean-François
(Van Doude) and Dominique (Michèle Girardon who, interestingly, bridges
the gap between the French New Wave and their American hero Howard
Hawks; a few years later Girardon would appear in Hawks' Hatari!).
The film's ending suggests that the poverty and desperation of the
middle section could be overcome by luck, by stumbling unwittingly into
fortune, and it has the effect of making Pierre's bleak period seem like
merely a bad dream, forgotten in the morning. Seen as an introduction
to the rest of Rohmer's career, it's as though he's dispensing with the
treatment of the lower classes by having his hero descend into poverty
only to be rescued from it as in a fairy tale; from then on, there'd be
little enough trace of class consciousness in Rohmer's films. Not that
there needed to be, of course; there have been few better documenters of
romantic questing and moral/philosophical introspection than Rohmer,
who truly found his subject once he began probing the inner lives of the
middle class. This first film, then, is interesting as an anomaly, as a
sign of what might've been, in which Rohmer is still working through
the influence of Renoir, perhaps grappling a bit with neorealism as
well. What's present already, in this first film, is the director's
strong eye for detail, his feel for building character through setting
and gesture, and above all, his deep love of people, with all their
foibles and troubles, all their failings and idiosyncrasies.