A Tale of Springtime (1990)
April 13, 2023 11:06 AM - Subscribe

Simple conversations engender complicated human interactions. Jeanne is open and even-tempered, a philosophy teacher at a lycée. Her fiancé is away and she doesn't want to stay at his messy flat; she's loaned hers to a cousin, so she accepts the invitation of Natasha, a music student whom she meets at a party, to sleep in her father Igor's bedroom because he's always with his young girlfriend, Eve.

Jeanne (Anne Teyssedre), a high school philosophy instructor, meets Natacha (Florence Darel) at a party. They become friends, and soon Jeanne, who shares an apartment in Paris with her messy boyfriend, is staying at Natacha's while her father (Hugues Quester), a middling French bureaucrat, is out of town. Very quickly, Jeanne realizes Natacha has something to hide -- and when her father comes home and discovers her in his flat, unacknowledged desires come to the forefront.

Michelle Orange: Jeanne shrugs in the way of someone who has accepted compromise and practicality as the true songs of adult life. Enough doubt lingers, however, for her to dabble in Rohmerian economics—whereby ordinary, extremely verbose individuals negotiate interwoven hierarchies of romantic love and personal freedom, conscious to the point of paralysis of getting the best deal, making the optimal choice, holding out for whatever the real thing might be.

Though numerous scenes play out in the pastoral setting of Natacha and Igor’s country house—where petulant, dad-obsessed Natacha clashes with smug, hair-swishing Ève, and Jeanne and Igor talk circles around whether to bone—the film’s aesthetic is one of private interiors, the spaces that serve as vessels for our lives, if not for time itself. Back and forth these characters go, packing and unpacking their bags. Here as in each entry in the four-seasons series, Rohmer extracts from what amounts to chronic human dithering a story of transience and possibility. Long takes and simple, picture-book compositions foreground a talky script whose chatter serves—as chatter so often does—mainly as a distraction.


Roger Ebert: Nothing very dramatic usually happens in a Rohmer film, or at least nothing loud and violent. The characters are usually too well-behaved and sometimes too distracted by their own problems to pay much attention to the plot Rohmer has thrust them into. That's one of the pleasures of a film like this; we can recognize the rhythms of real life, in which personal drama sometimes has to wait while we attend to routine duties. There's the sense in a Rohmer film that the characters are free to walk out, if they want to; they're not on assignment to stick with the plot to the bitter end, as they are in a Hollywood film.

The appeal of a Rohmer film depends on the personal charm of the actors; they are usually pleasant, bright and bourgeois, and we want them to find happiness but are not going to lose much sleep if they fail in their quest. The real appeal may be that they lead lives like ours, but in other bodies and with other friends. Their decisions are like test drives for trips we might take ourselves someday.


Ed Howard: the ring of Gyges is an ingenious metaphor for the cinema: the audience, granted an invisible vantage point by Rohmer's camera, voyeuristically spies on this woman as she goes through her prosaic day, coming no closer to understanding her thoughts or the rationale behind her actions. The cinema, with its emphasis on surfaces, actions, and words, is necessarily as limited as the senses of sight and hearing themselves; we all rely on appearances and the truthfulness of words to understand our fellow beings.

It is certainly appropriate that Rohmer, always very concerned with the ways in which place affects character, has made a film in which place is the central dramatic device of the story.


Trailer
posted by Carillon (1 comment total)
 
First of the Four Seasons! I enjoyed a lot of this, there was a lot to say about friendship, apathy, and how people act as they age in the world around us. The stupid posts driven into the floor of the dining room are a perfect example and metaphor. You cement something into your life, hate it, but can't then change it, so you have to adapt around it. That said I found the wole age difference between Eloise and Hughes a bit distasteful. Maybe it's cultural thing, but I'd have hoped for more of an investigation into such a large gap, and the power dynamics that come from it? The acting though is quite good, I could see it coming across as 'wooden', but I think that misses the subtlety.
posted by Carillon at 11:12 AM on April 13, 2023


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