Collection

Six Moral Tales

6 films

Six brief affairs of the mind, from one of cinema's great moral philosophers, Éric Rohmer spent the 1960s and early '70s turning his ideas about cinema into film with this septet of stories about temptation and self-deception. Each installment follows a man already committed to one woman who finds himself drawn to another, only to talk himself back to the first — Rohmer's interest lying less in what his characters do than in the elaborate reasoning they use for justification. Shot with an understated, naturalistic eye and narrated in a wry first-person, the films move from the two black-and-white shorts that open the series to the lush, seasonal features that follow, cementing Rohmer as one of the New Wave's most distinct and influential voices.