Conte d'hiver

The second of Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons. This is a beautiful movie. Low-keyed, quite, slow- but not at all too slow. Simple story with complex characters; Interesting to the end. I can't wait to see the other "seasons".

Second chapter of Rohmer's Tales Of The Four Seasons (before filming Winter's Tale he made Spring's Tale). This time the french director tells us the story of Felice, a girl in the search of her soul mate. Actually she had found him in some holidays, his name was Charles, and she got pregnant, but at the end of that summer of joy and love she gave him a wrong address... so she never saw his love again and couldn't locate him either. Five years after she's living in Paris, at her mother's house, with her daughter and she's going out with two different men, although she's not in love with none of'em. She can't love anyone but Charles. Will she ever find the lost love of her life? Does she believe in miracles? That's something we'll find out as we watch this Rohmer's film.

Gene Hackman said in some movie that "watching a Rohmer's movie is just like watching a plant grow". Obviously that'll be the opinion of most of the people (especially those who enjoy themselves watching Steven Seagal or Van Damme's movies); but there's something else in cinema (and in life) as well as kicks, guns, explosions, and parties. What about feelings, reflexions, love, doubts, philosophy? That's what Eric Rohmer seems to care about, and that's what he usually talks about in his movies. Ordinary people, living ordinary lives, with their ordinary problems, and their ordinary conflicts. In some way he's such a "voyeur": he puts his camera in some corner of the room and lets the characters express themselves. How they feel, what do they expect from life, what are their dreams, their fears... I think that's why he usually works with unknown actors and actresses: that way the audience feels like they're watching a completely unknown talking or crying, or laughing. I would not work the same if he picked Gerard Depardieu or Juliette Binoche for this sort of movies. Also he uses a literary language in the dialogues (dialogues, the base of Rohmer's cinematography), though his movies show ordinary situations the people in there definitely doesn't talk like normal people. Some may say that's a handicap, that people doesn't talk about existence and the meaning of life when they're having a coffee in some coffee-shop; but when I want to hear real-life dialogues with real-life sentences, rough language, and so I just go and watch some Tarantino movie.

I wouldn't recommend Rohmer's movies to anyone; 'cause I assume that movies such as Winter's Tale may result boring for many people. So I only recommend this movie (and the rest of Tales of the Four Seasons) to those who look for something else in cinema and (again) in life apart from hollow entertainment.

My Rate: 8/10

Felicie (Charlotte Véry), another of Eric Rohmer's attractive, smart, but terminally indecisive women is still feeling the effects of the abrupt end to her summer romance five years ago. Having mistakenly given her lover Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) the wrong address as he was leaving for the U.S., she cannot really love other men and holds onto a strong belief that Charles will one day show up and all will be right with the world. Eric Rohmer's second film in his Four Seasons series, A Tale of Winter, is one of his most engaging romances, a film that like the Shakespeare play of the same name, postulates that passion and strong intention can lead to totally unexpected results.

The opening sequence shows Charles and Felicie enjoying the sun, making love, then parting at the end of their vacation. The scene then shifts to Christmas in Paris five years later. Elise (Ava Lorachi), the daughter she had with Charles is now four years old and has seen her father only through photos. Felicie has two lovers but none suit her. Maxence (Michael Voletti) is a heavy set, not too deep hairdresser who is moving from Paris to Nevers and wants Felicie to come with him. She loves being with him but is not madly in love with him. After first saying no, she agrees to go to Nevers but once there, has yet another change of heart after an epiphany about Charles during a visit to a cathedral and returns to her mother in Paris.

Felicie's other suitor, Loic (Hervé Furic), is a bookish librarian who is obviously crazy about her but whom she just wants as a friend. He is a Catholic intellectual and Felicie is more free-spirited and they engage in typical Rohmerian exchanges about Christianity, reincarnation and the nature of the soul. A new awareness opens up when she visits the theater with Loic to see Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. When she sees King Leontes bring a statue of his wife to life after being told, ''It is required that you do awake your faith'', her own ability to "awake her faith" is evoked and leads to one of Rohmer's more upbeat and satisfying conclusions.

The second film in Eric Rohmer's Four Season series, Conte d'hiver is the story of a woman (Charlotte Very) who meets a man she falls in love with (Frederic van den Driessche) and has a daughter by (unknown to him) after they have said goodbye and she has inadvertently given him the wrong address, making it impossible for him to find her again. Five years later we find her in a strange menage a trois, attracted to, but not in love with, two different men each of whom she leaves for the other. Offering her different things, she is unable to choose between them, aware that she is still in love with the father of her child. Like its predecessor in the series, Conte de printemps, and so many other Rohmer films, this is a film replete with reflections on love and life. It is also a film about integrity, and the costs to oneself and others of emotional faithfulness to a lost love; indeed this is what gives the film its focus, as the purity of her lost love stands in counterpoint to the banal and seemingly meaningless choices that are available to her in her daily life. Charlotte Very's performance makes us care what happens to her, and the poignancy of her dilemma is brought home towards the end of the film by 'a play within a play' - a scene from a sumptuously produced version of Shakespeare's A Tale In Winter which should be required viewing for anyone who believes that Shakespeare and his contemporaries have nothing to say to a modern audience. This is a beautiful and moving film, which I would commend to anyone interested in the complexity of human emotions and responses.

It has been a pleasure catching up with the eminently civilised cinema of Eric Rohmer recently. He is a director who needs the re-see treatment every so often as many of his works tend to blur into one because of their similarity. Of course the beach ones look different from the urban ones but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish one group of characters talking around a table from another doing the same thing unless one knows the films really well. Although there is no denying that Rohmer is the master observer of the minutiae of middle class French everyday living, I find my response to his works differs considerably from film to film, always according to the degree with which he interests me in his characters. In one important sense however all his films are worth watching and that is the skill with which he evokes the most marvellous naturalistic acting from his actors, particularly from young women. Even a film as tiresome as "The Aviator's Wife" is redeemed by the the masterly performance by the young girl the hero meets in a Paris park. For anyone wishing to embark on an exploration of Rohmer, the tetralogy of films of the four seasons made during the late 'eighties and 'nineties will provide a particularly fertile experience. The characters in "Spring" and "Autumn" are admittedly the least interesting and I find the viticulturist and her matchmaking friend in "Autumn" rather tiresome. The young man holidaying in "Summer" has dilemmas in his relationships with three girls about which one really does not care, but the film is most agreeable to watch. If these three films represent Rohmer at this more mundane, "Un Conte d'hiver" is a different matter altogether. There is nothing discursive in a work in which the director seems to have balanced form and content perfectly. It is like a sonata form movement in music with a long central development bordered by a short exposition and recapitulation. In the opening, young man meets young woman on holiday. It is the passion of a lifetime that ends with the misadventure of a confused address. Unable to find her child's father the woman resigns herself to trying to find love in other men. She vacillates between a hairdresser and a librarian, nice enough people but we know as she does deep down that there can be no substitute for that idyllic holiday encounter. Our self identification with the dilemma of the young woman, marvellously played by Charlotte Very, is so acute that the resolution when it eventually arrives literally made me shout and cry for joy. In "Conte d'Hiver" Rohmer has given us one of cinema's great feel-good factor films to stand alongside "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Quiet Man".