Le rayon vert

Something new on the screen! The sun shines, the wind blows, the clouds scud but it never rains. The treetops shiver in the melancholy gusts, the people gasp and murmur and gesticulate, and tears run down our heroine's cheeks. Again and again her face contorts as her fragile boat grinds on the rocky bottom.

A frustrated secretary lives for love. When a chance encounter informs her of the green ray, she is enamoured, thinking that this controversial phenomenon will bring the psychic clarity she so needs. She has so little self-esteem that she identifies with everything around her, she is somehow somewhat egoless, a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a tortured heart. Her frame is delicate, almost skeletal. Fear is eating her soul.

She cannot reciprocate the robust friendship of one group of people due to her delicate vegetarian outlook (which she paradoxically defends with great vigour and the most articulacy she summons in two hours on screen). But she is excluded also due to the delicacy she cannot control (her sea-sickness, her love-sickness...) Wherever she goes, in fact, she cannot make friends. The ski bums of the alps treat her with relaxed cool cordiality but she leaves immediately because, she says, "I know that place". The implication is that she thinks she's leaving because the place is decadent and full of one night stands but that the underlying reality is of her not being able to stomach any reminder of herself. She wants to be reborn with a childlike clarity in the last miraculous light of the dying sun. This emphasises a cycle of small deaths and rebirths - falling into and out of love, leaving home, coming back again, leaving again.

This film is deeply concerned with one person and may seem obsessive, but it's one way of looking at life and has of course many resonances for our self-obsessed selves. Of course we cannot escape from ourselves, though we can expand that self so that it is not so claustrophobic to live in.

I am a big fan of this director. I saw this film many years ago, and it made a great impression on me. It is one of the most hopeful movies I have ever seen. It think it captures how magical moments can intrude into our lives when we least expect them. This is an exceedingly quiet movie, but stay with it, it builds up to a wonderful catharsis. The lead actress gives a good depiction of a frustrated, melancholy woman trying to find her way out of difficult period in her life. To enjoy this movie, it helps greatly if you are fascinated by unusual astronomical phenomena, and French and Swedish women. . .and you must be willing to stick to a movie which has long moments when not much seems to be happening. I guess I really like the lead actress, she is superb!

Watching the film,we keenly feel the same inevasible loneliness as the heroine Delphine.While trivial conversations keep going and going(seems non-stop for ever),the loneliness become more and more intolerable.No one can,or is ready to,understand others(even being friends).Then Delphine's every attempt to communicate has to get dissolved in pretence and indifference from others.It's the common situation shared by everyone who still hold his/her dreams like Delphine.

Rohmer has considerable mercy to show the final appearing of "Le Rayon Vert".£¬It offers us some redeeming hope so that we can collect our confidence and faith in life to looke for "Rayon Vert" of ourselves.Maybe we will be still waiting in the final twilight of life,but our dreams will remain beautiful and vivid the same,right?

In the film,Rohmer shows more sympathy and affection on his characters than usual,much considerately as we see.Of course I just watched a few from him.This time I see none of the distinct irony(sometimes acrid) in formers.

btw,the actress Marie Riviere portrays "blue" Delphine perfectly.And I surprisedly find her also in "Writers",along with Rohmer. Expect more from them.

I thoroughly enjoyed Le Rayon Vert. It showed "real" people, people that I felt I could relate to. This effect was achieved through improvisatory conversations and at points an almost documentary-style film-making technique, with the camera zooming in with mood changes or if something interesting is said (though make no mistake the framing and composition are very carefully controlled).

It's a character study of a lonely Parisienne secretary called Delphine, she is meant to be going off on holiday with a friend, but he cancels at short notice, so she has a dreaded improvised holiday.

What follows is an anatomy of loneliness, a description of the reasons why Delphine is lonely. It's strange to me because the film seemed to be positing two types of understanding, firstly there is fatalistic, bordering on mystic: Delphine is a Capricorn, as the lady at the outdoor dinner says, a goat climbing up a mountain alone. Her destiny seems to be written on cards she finds in the street, she's perhaps portrayed as not being capable of being anything different than what she is, a lonely introvert.

But then on the other hand the film is supposedly instructive, with a moral, and we have people trying to tell Delphine how to engage with life, for example a very outgoing Swedish tourist, and perhaps Delphine is engaging at the end of the film, or on the other hand she has merely been blown by the wind and allowed herself to be picked up a more promising candidate than previously she has met (there are a number of failed attempts to pick her up during the movie).

The movie is visually beautiful, I just love seeing movies shot in 4:3 these days. If you're dealing with human beings, my opinion is that you should be in 4:3, it's essentially portraiture. If you're shooting the Rio Grande or any other large spaces, then go with widescreen. There's some lovely shots of Delphine in the verdancy of nature, when Delphine and the little girl are eating wild blackcurrants (I felt like a child again seeing this, I could taste the blackcurrants), also of a very strange narrow green avenue Delphine goes down in the countryside. Then there's the colours, the red on the clothes that the characters are wearing (Delphine wears red but is searching for green, a contradiction), and little splashes of green all over the place punctuating the compositions. On the topic of Delphine being a walking contradiction, Delphine describes herself as not operating or not functional, like a normal person and then says, "I never do anything special to find someone or something". I always describe myself a bit like that, like a hungry dog that has lost the instinct to bite.

She's much like myself in many ways, when she's talking to the Swede they have a conversation about romantic encounters being a card game, Delphine says she has no cards, she just is exactly what you see, absolutely no coquetry is involved. Well that's me as well. She's really gauche in conversations, the vegetarianism discussion was a great example. I'm also an enthusiast concerning ideals and I love to talk about them given half a chance, but, for example discussing, in the manner of a dog with a bone, how meat-eating is unconscionable, at a table of carnivores, is not very tactful. I often behave like this.

The scene with the blackcurrants is perhaps the most painful, Delphine is staying in Cherbourg with the family of a friend, as a little girl asks her innocent questions about her life, and Delphine's unsocialised paranoia takes over and she wants to know who has put the girl up to asking.

It's a superb movie and it makes me want to see more Rohmer.

A single woman in Paris looks to salvage her summer vacation after her original plans are disrupted. Is she shy or depressed or just picky when it comes to men? The answer is not necessarily revealed but it is a pleasant journey as we get to know her and accompany her on scenic excursions in France. Riviere, who co-wrote the script with Rohmer, is quite good as the woman whose boyfriend seems to have left her and who feels like her life is falling apart, but is also unsure what she wants out of life. She is not a particularly sympathetic character but she does seem real. Instead of revealing any big truths, Rohmer is mostly interested in the little things that reveal character.