A tour of Éric Rohmer’s Paris: how his locations look today

Although just as known for putting provincial France on the big screen, there’s little doubt that director Éric Rohmer also had a knack for creating detailed portraits of Paris. Moving to the capital in the 1940s while working as a journalist, the French New Wave director was soon documenting the city and the lives of its inhabitants in distinctive ways.

Like a number of his contemporaries, in particular Agnès Varda and Jacques Rivette, Rohmer found the format of characters walking around the city to be a fruitful one. In fact, Rohmer arguably took it to the furthest extreme, with many of his feature films finding drama in simply letting characters walk and talk. As such, Rohmer’s filmography presents one of cinema’s most detailed depictions of the capital.

Whether it be in the city’s beautiful parks, its endless boulevards or its brasseries and cafés, Rohmer’s obsession with quotidian Paris makes a number of his films unofficial guides to the city, offering plenty of pointers as to where to enjoy a truly authentic Parisian atmosphere. Here are five Parisian locations from Rohmer’s back catalogue and how they look today.

Rohmer’s propensity for having his characters walk the city was there in the earliest of his feature films. In his debut Le Signe du lion, Rohmer forces his main character Pierre (Jess Hahn) to walk the city more than most, even to the point of exhaustion. As a result, we see Paris in a huge amount of detail, from its famous landmarks to smaller street markets and cafés. The location chosen here is shown when Pierre decides to walk by the Seine. We first see Pierre walk down some steps near to a bridge.

The bridge is the Pont Royal near to the Louvre. The bridge and steps are unchanged.

He walks further along to a greener stretch of the path running parallel to Quai François Mitterrand. The area is somewhat less green today but is still recognisable.

Finally, much to Pierre’s dismay, the pathway under the next bridge is closed. The bridge is the Pont du Carrousel, and the pathway underneath was thankfully open when I visited.

One of Rohmer’s most detailed short films about Paris is The Bakery Girl of Monceau, the first of his series of Six Moral Tales, which opens with a detailed description of the avenues and cafés around Villiers. The boulangerie in question, seen a little later, is in the actual location the voiceover describes. We first see a shot of the road sign for rue de Saussure, above the bakery.

Next we see the bakery itself, including shots of its interior as the young man of the film (Barbet Schroeder) enters. Today, the bakery is a closed-down fitness centre.

Rohmer’s narrator suggests that the bakery is on rue Lebouteux, showing a road that sits opposite the bakery. However, the building sits on the corner of both roads.

No one filmed Parisian cafés better than Rohmer. A Rohmer-inspired café crawl would make for a great way to explore Paris. A notable example is seen in Love in the Afternoon, the celebrated final instalment of his series of Six Moral Tales. The film’s protagonist Frédéric (Bernard Verley) is wandering both physically and emotionally throughout the film. He works in an office on rue de la Pépinière, so it’s natural that his regular haunt – the café returned to several times throughout the film – is nearby.

The café he sits in is Le Saint Augustin on rue de la Pépinière. It’s easily identifiable in the previous shot as the restaurant La Pépinière is seen outside the window. The shops seen to the right in the following shot, however, have dramatically changed with the exception of the tabac.

As with many of Paris’s notable cafés, Le Saint Augustin has changed a great deal in the 50 years since Rohmer filmed there. It remains a perfect spot, however, for that quintessentially Rohmeresque pastime of gazing at passers-by out of the window.

Not all of Rohmer’s cafés are conducive to pleasant experiences. This is most notable in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Reinette (Joëlle Miquel) finds out to her dismay that Parisian life may not be as gentle and friendly as her life in the country. Agreeing to meet Mirabelle (Jessica Forde) at a café, she heads there early only to be confronted by one of the rudest waiters in cinema (Philippe Laudenbach). The café was La Liberté on rue de la Gaîté.

Since filming, the outdoor seating has become more contained: in Rohmer’s film, the chairs are shown spreading out over the pavements.

Unable to cope with the rudeness of the waiter, Reinette and Mirabelle flee to the steps of the Edgar Quinet métro station. The entrance has been slightly extended since Rohmer’s time, but is largely unchanged.

The 1995 portmanteau film Rendezvous in Paris was the last time a Rohmer film focused on the modern capital (2001’s The Lady and the Duke recreated Paris at the time of the French Revolution on digital backdrops). Its various tales of dates occurring around the city take in a wealth of Parisian locations. But the most memorable of these recurs at various points throughout when a singer (Florence Levu) and accordion player (Christian Bassoul) perform renditions appropriate to the short chapters of the film, partly in homage to René Clair’s 1930 Paris musical Sous les toits de Paris. The location for these is rue Saint-Blaise, not far from the house of Rohmer’s friend Chris Marker. It’s still recognisable today, because the Église Saint-Germain de Charonne is seen at the end of the street.

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