Look at Eric Rohmer’s films. They, too, feature extended sequences of walking and talking, and he grants his actors an element of shambling freedom of the sort that seems lacking in Bergman’s film. But Rohmer’s images, too, are radically precise—as is the tension that his characters confront in them. Rohmer is a closet surrealist, and his taut visual patterns combine with his conflict-laden stories and his dialectically repressed characters to suggest a world of furious, even violent, yet latent desires. Kept firmly under pressure, these desires result in a world of aesthetic refinements that, however, should never be mistaken for daintiness or mere prettiness, and demand to be understood in terms of their animal energies.