The Aviator's Wife (1981)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Pilot Plight

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Éric Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife is one of his most purely enjoyable films, based around a simple premise and building its interesting relationships from it. (Tellingly, the title character, the aviator's wife, is never seen.) François (Philippe Marlaud), who is twenty, is dating the twenty-five year-old Anne (Marie Rivière). Another lover of Anne's, an airline pilot named Christian (Mathieu Carrière) goes to her apartment to tell her it's over and that he's returning to his wife. They leave together, and François sees them, assuming that Anne is having an affair. Later he sees Christian with another woman and, without really having much of a plan, decides to follow them. Riding the bus with François and the couple, fifteen-year-old Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury) gets in on the action, eventually coaxing François into telling her the whole story.

François and Lucie spend the center section of the film talking, trying to figure out what's going on. She even devises a plan to take a photo of some tourists to get a secret snapshot of the woman. An epilogue has François speaking with Anne, and we get the impression that they have even less in common that François does with Lucie. (It's interesting that their ages are in increments of five, with François stuck directly in-between the two women.) A bittersweet final scene leaves his future uncertain. Rohmer's films can sometimes fade away in the memory, but this one has a tendency to stick; we keep thinking about François' strange day and what it all means for him. This was the first of Rohmer's six-film "Comedies and Proverbs" series; the proverb here is "It is impossible to think about nothing."

Metrograph Pictures and Kino Lorber's excellent 2023 Blu-ray release is a happy occasion, given that much of Rohmer's middle-to-late-period output has been passed over in the Blu-ray age (and early DVD transfers are particularly abysmal). The Aviator's Wife is being released alongside Boyfriends and Girlfriends and Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (both 1987). This disc includes a commentary track by film historian Adrian Martin and a re-release trailer. Highly Recommended.