On what the films of Eric Rohmer reveal about what dialogue can do in cinema.

Rohmer's films — My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, The Green Ray, Pauline at the Beach — are among the most dialogue-intensive films ever made. Characters talk about their feelings, their beliefs, their observations, their philosophical positions, at length, with precision. Nothing much else happens.

This should produce tedious cinema. It produces something entirely different: the experience of being close to other people's thinking in a way that most films avoid.

The reason it works is that Rohmer's dialogue is not expository. His characters are not explaining themselves to the audience. They are in the middle of figuring things out, and the figuring-out is the drama. A character who has a clear position in scene three will discover that position is wrong by scene seven, not because of a plot event but because conversation has revealed its inadequacy.

What Rohmer understood is that the most dramatic events in most lives are conversations: moments when you say something and immediately know you shouldn't have, or when someone says something that changes what you know about yourself. Cinema usually dramatizes the consequences of these moments. Rohmer dramatizes the moments themselves.