Le beau mariage

Beatrice Romand is a perfect cast for the hot-headed, impetuous, self-confident and immature young girl in the leading role, while Andre Dussollier plays the role of a quintessential bourgeois Frenchman, charming, courteous, discreet, and tactful. His tact has reached the point of being hypocritical which makes the audience exasperate for the young girl, who has been kept on tenterhooks for too long and would not take no for an answer. Her insistent and blind chase of a man who is obviously not interested in her is only made worse by the reticence of the object of her pursuit. Rohmer's films are usually wordy sometimes tedious, they suit only certain type of audience. This one is definitely not tedious. An interesting and comical study of manners and mentalities in different classes of French society of the late 20th century.

I have seen most of Eric Rohmer's films, but it took me a while to see this elegant movie from 1982, perhaps because it has the critical reputation of being one of his weaker efforts. Sabine (Rohmer regular Beatrice Romand, in a fine performance that makes us empathize with an immature and not very sympathetic character) is a young woman, tired of her relationship with a married man. She breaks up with him and decides it's time to marry. Not to anyone in particular, she just thinks its time to find someone that is good enough and settle with him and marry. In one party, she meets Edmond, a thirty-something lawyer (Andre Dussolier, a character actor from many French movies), a serious and handsome man who is a cousin to her best friend. She approaches him, he is polite to her but seems uninterested in her advances. But she interprets this as him playing hard to get, so in the following days she would step up her advances, to the point where she starts acting in an increasingly erratic manner. Not much more than this happens in the film, until towards the end we learn of the result of her pursuit of Edmond.

What some reviewers objected to in this film was that her behavior was unrealistic, but I don't feel that way (I certainly have known women of this type, though of course movies tend to exaggerate behaviors). "No man can resist me", Sabine boasts when Edmond politely rejects her advances. She has the arrogance some beautiful women have when they are young (since beauty fades and tends to do it faster than expected, women like this are in for some reality check when they age).

So, summing up, while this might not be among Rohmer's very best, it is certainly well done, and above his average.

A simple story placed in a windy village in the outskirts of Paris: a story which could have happened nowadays. A 25 years old girl not nice, but very strong minded who decides to get married to matter to whom. You perceive different worlds and environments: high and low bourgeoisie, the capital and the suburbs and in the middle a person with his problems, ideas, opinion, sentiments. It is a sweet and clever film and Rohmer is a master in describing his characters: you feel all the French great cultural tradition behind him.

eric rohmer's films are so clearly his. The slow but deliberate pacing and crisp, to-the-point dialogue are two hallmarks of his style for me, and this film is an excellent example of those two qualities.

As with the other rohmer films I have seen, the characters are less individual, specific personalities than they are vessels for a type of person or for one side of an argument. Here we have the two female leads almost skipping exposition entirely, and going straight into philosophical discussions of love and marriage. What I like about monsieur rohmer is that he manages to do this without taking away all our empathy for his characters. He always shows us how the character's hands are played out, so we can see what the result of their actions were, and think about what we would have done, or will do in our lives. tres bien, monsieur rohmer; j'adore vos travails.

Rohmer likes his morals and the moral for me here is how moving from one stage in life to another can't be forced. We can't decide to be in a different 'place' in life on a whim, without doing the maturing first. There's no short-cut. The cringeworthy party scene is perhaps the telling scene. Not just because of Sabine's inability to crawl out from childish ways, but equally Edmond's inability to cast his mind back to a time when he was giddy and foolish and work didn't matter. The supporting cast - friend Claude, Mother and the antiques dealer all have wisdom that comes through experience, but they know better than to waste too much breath with logic that headstrong Sabine is not ready for. A rites of passage, "find-out-the-hard-way" movie that's not as slight as first glances might suggest.