The Aviator's Wife

The inaugural film of Eric Rohmer’s sparkling “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork as he seeks a narrative expression of the opening epigraph: “It is impossible to think of nothing.” A young man sees his girlfriend’s ex leaving her apartment one early morning, and his imagination is off to the races, as stars Philippe Marlaud and Marie Rivière (The Green Ray) introduce a younger, less perfectly articulate type of Rohmer character than those of the “Moral Tales.”