Suzanne's Career

"Suzanne's Career" is a rather slow moving story about three friends. One is a bit of a Romeo and is focused on his current conquest, Suzanne. The other is a friend who narrates the film. His role is odd--he just hangs around the two and acts a bit like a chaperon--a chaperon who disappears when the pair want to sleep together. Eventually, the simple girl, Suzanne, turns out to be a bit more clever than either guy had expected and soon begins to make eyes at the chaperon. What is going on here? See the film yourself if you'd like to know.

Watching "Suzanne's Career" reminds me of a home movie--a very good home movie, but a home movie nonetheless. It appears to have been made using an 8mm camera, is quite grainy, have occasionally sloppy edits and has no titles or introduction. The camera also appears to have been hand-held at times and is, occasionally, a bit jerky. Because of all these factors and the non-professional style of the acting, it's not very easy to take this film seriously. The way I see it, it's a way for Eric Rohmer fans to see his early works in order to see how much he improved and evolved over the next few decades. And because of all this, it's NOT a movie for the casual viewer--more for the die-hard Rohmer fans. And, because I assume this was only made for Rohmer and his New Wave buddies, I really don't think it's possible to score this one.

By the way, twice in the film the line "Girls like to be forced" was repeated. How very progressive!!

Suzanne's Career is a really interesting moral story from Rohmer but it fails to amuse me, there is a lot to like but it's badly paced movie. There are some interesting ideas but they aren't utilized unlike in his other movies...

The French film La carrière de Suzanne(1963) was shown in the U.S. with the translated title Suzanne's Career. It was written and directed by Éric Rohmer. It's the second of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

The movie is about four young adults acting like adolescents. They pair up, break up, and come back together again. They talk, talk, talk, mostly about each other.

The two men are Philippe Beuzen as Bertrand and Christian Charrière as Guillaume. The two women are Catherine Sée as Suzanne and Diane Wilkinson as Sophie. It's interesting to me that none of the four had a successful film career following this movie.

This film has a borderline IMDb rating of 7.0. I didn't think it was that good and rated it 6. My thought is that the only reason to see this film is to complete your viewing of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

This is the second of the moral tales. Rohmer is a bit of an acquired taste. For me, it's that the characters are often unlikeable or weak. In this one, Suzanne is a young woman, enamored with Gillaume, a self centered bad boy Jerk who uses his friends. She is continually mistreated by this guy, and, of course, goes back to him. Bertrand, the feckless other man, Gillaume's friend, is taken with Suzanne and has a seemingly hopeless, puppy-like relationship with her. She pays when they go out, draining her resources. But she is actually using him. What happens is inconsequential. Rohmer is practicing his craft, developing characters, playing them against each other, and keeping out of it. When people meet, they engage in boring conversations. They are so introspective that we wish something would happen, but nothing really does. Just look at these people and enjoy the mastery of a director who knows how to make them real.

This film by Eric Rohmer shows that the style for which he has become famous was developed at an early stage - a concentration on the relationships between young people performed by unknown actors in an almost documentary style. As usual with Rohmer the performances of the actors are variable and not much happens in terms of plot. Instead the film concentrates on the emotional development of its young subjects, with the central character a little wiser by the end. The scenes on central Paris in the early sixties mean that part of the film's appeal is as an historical document in the same way as Chabrol's "Les Bonnes Femmes" and Varda's "Cleo De 5 a 7".