Q: Who is Eric Rohmer?

A: Variously: Late French director. Contemporary of Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut in the nouvelle vague. Adept budgeter and distributor of his own movies. Psychogeographer. Parisian. Cinephile.

For Rohmer in Paris, English academic and filmmaker Richard Misek feverishly collected and catalogued the hours and hours of footage shot by the French director Eric Rohmer in his beloved adopted city, creating a documentary that weaves together images of traffic in Paris, shopping in Paris, drinking in Paris—and, inevitably, smoking in Paris. The result is an ode to Rohmer's obsessions with the city, documenting the erotically charged frissons that characterize urban life as much as the architecture.

Misek posits Rohmer’s Paris as almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Like a real-life dérive around the French capital, the Eiffel Tower is ever present in his films, haunting the celluloid and punching its way into view like a nagging thought. His characters such as Delphine in The Green Ray (1986) play out an encircling pattern of chance meetings and near misses on a search, more often than not, for love.

“Rohmer’s films repeat themselves because all lives repeat themselves,” says Misek, and the director built his films around a matrix of coincidences and connections that joined the dots between his protagonists’ journeys to the suburbs, to the country, to a holiday. But, like their creator, they can never shake off the city.

rohmerinparis.com.