Critics reviews

"L’Ami de Mon Amie" offers an insight into Éric Rohmer’s fascination with setting in film. Rohmer relies on oppositional imagery to shape the story: nature in contrast to the New Town, green against blue. He then manages to demonstrate more forcefully the characters’ feelings about their situation and each other.

"Boyfriends and Girlfriends" is among Rohmer’s lightest, most playful (and most overtly schematic) confections, breezing through the major preoccupations of the Comedies and Proverbs series like icing on a particularly rich cake. As such, it feels very much like the summation of the preceding five works, an airily diagrammatic working through, and at least partial commentary upon, their prevailing characteristics.

Questions of fidelity and betrayal, delusion and deceit lie at the film's heart, which is large indeed, extending ample compassion to the characters... Funny, moving, and full of insights that other directors barely dream of, it is quite simply an absolute charmer.

It's all inconsequential, yet Rohmer's deft handling of his cast and his insight into the workings of the twentysomething mind makes the prattlings of these self-obsessed nobodies utterly compelling.

A particular bonus here is the depiction of contemporary life in a kind of sterile suburban high-rise community that’s rarely seen in the French cinema but that seems very typical of recent French life; a direct correlation appears to be made between the shopping-mall sterility of the locations, where the characters generally meet, and the remoteness that they often seem to have from one another’s thoughts and feelings.

At his most graceful, Rohmer is able to suggest that there is a natural, rational, perfectly fulfilling order in the world, if only we have the intelligence to recognize it; in ''Boyfriends and Girlfriends,'' however, that order seems less discovered than imposed... We`re always aware of the fact that the director is the puppet master of the proceedings. The effect is certainly a deliberate one... but it costs Rohmer a degree of his customary elegance.

For those who collect [Rohmer], this is less scintillating than “Pauline at the Beach"--and it has no character as magnetic as Arielle Dombasle nor as marvelously self-deluding--but it has a bracing sort of charm that grows on you.

[Rohmer] has no great purpose [here], but an interesting small one: He wants to observe the everyday behavior of a new class of French person, the young professionals whose values are mostly materialistic, whose ideas have been shaped by popular culture, who do not read much, or think much about politics, or have much depth.

[A] small, perfectly achieved new addition to [Rohmer's] "Comedies and Proverbs"... as clean and functional in appearance as the satellite city, but full of unexpected delights. As usual, every member of Mr. Rohmer's cast is very good, but Miss Chaulet may well be a brand-new star.