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Film Review By John Demetry
Margot, whom Gaspard meets while on vacation, introduces him to shanty songs while he tags along on her ethnological studies of local culture. The experience inspires him to write an original shanty song about the daughter of a pirate. Although he spends leisure time going for walks and talking with Margot, developing a genuine bond of friendship disrupted by both her obvious, yet restrained, attraction for him and his oblivious self-involvement, the subject of his shanty song is Lena, for whom he's waiting to join him on vacation. Because he realizes that his love for Lena is a hopeless act of romantic projection, he allows his attentions to be diverted by Solene, with whom he flirts by offering her the shanty song to sing. Then, he runs into Lena on the beach. She says: "You said you'd write me a sea shanty." He responds: "It's not ready." The film's poster tagline reads: "Three women. One choice." But the decision ends up being a non-decision. The choice is the song. Rohmer's narrative felicity is breathtakingly rich. You have to scoff when people describe his plots and style as "simple" or "talky" or, at this point, the condescending cliche, "deceptively simple." To make every moment of non-action, or near-action, so fraught with the suspense and weight of spiritual crisis, Rohmer clearly works through as rigorous, audacious, and idiosyncratic a style as Brian De Palma. (Pace the nod to the museum sequence from De Palma's Dressed to Kill in Rohmer's cumulative Rendezvous In Paris.) The way Rohmer integrates the creating of the shanty song with Gaspard's romantic dilemmas is evidence enough, but go deeper. Note the way each dialogue-heavy sequence reveals the contradictions between character thought, expression, and action that drive the plot. In one of the dialogue sequences that capture the complexity of call-and-response, Margot suggests, and argues for, the possibility of Gaspard taking Solene as a romantic diversion. Gaspard dismisses the idea: "I'm not her type."
As with the existential hope of Boyfriends and Girlfriends and cruelty of the first chapter of Rendezvous In Paris, Rohmer here utilizes his film critic's appreciation of screwball tropes to locate a modern form for investigating timeless themes. The difference is on what his plots turn. Not on narrative contrivance, but on a moral and philosophical axiom do his spiritual screwballs spin. Don't confuse this with moralizing. It's Rohmer's self-examining honesty that makes him an artist. It's also what, ultimately, separates him from Gaspard. Rohmer's story indicts his own indecisiveness, but his camera chooses Margot. Notably played by Amanda Langlet, Margot retains the wisdom and grace Langlet earned as the title character of Pauline at the Beach who comes of age amidst that film's vertiginous moral quagmire. A lush irony, Armond White referred to Pauline at the Beach, photographed by the late, legendary Nestor Almendros, as "the most beautiful comedy ever shot in color" - and he's right. It's beautiful in the way that Henry James' The Golden Bowl is the most beautiful of all novels because the terrors and triumphs of knowledge are so ambiguously drawn. James' high-wire control of written language is equaled by Rohmers' mastery of film language. Almendros' Impressionistic work on Pauline displayed subtly intoxicating shadings of space, color, and light, while Diane Baratier's photography for A Summer's Tale is more evenly--and fully--lit, allowing for an expansive depth of field and for a more sculptural appreciation of the performers. The mysteries of perceptual reality suffuse every frame, not least of which are the way the actors' skin absorb and reflect the light and the way their bodies move within the landscape. With its whimsical philosophers, A Summer's Tale is Rohmer's sexiest, most erotic film. The tanning of Poupaud's skin marks Gaspard's trek toward a moral dead-end. The voluptuous brunette, Gwanaelle Simon as Solene, with her strict, pseudo-Romantic philosophy of love, is herself some high Romantic ideal of femininity--Rohmer seems to discover curves on her that never before existed to our eyes. A nineties Jane Austen heroine who views love as a perfect social match, Lena is played by Aurelia Nolin, the palest of the bunch: a blond, pretty, and delicate reflective surface humanized by Rohmer. Then, there is Langlet's Margot. With her short-cropped brown hair, she absorbs the light - and our attention - radiating it back out - to us. I first noticed this photographic quality of hers in Pauline at the Beach during the final sequence when she and her cousin agree to lie to each other about an infidelity. Pauline knows the whole truth and her cousin, roughly the same complexion as Simon, has only suspicions and self-delusions. The dialogue is a shot-reverse-shot with Langlet graphically contrasting the other. Langlet is illuminated by a sensual halo. This tactile spirituality recalls the F.W. Murnau of Sunshine and Tabu. Murnau's cinema of mise-en-scene has been described as the fulfilling of the tensions between the elements within every shot. That's also how Rohmer works, but with an added twist: many of his shots seem truncated just before obvious (pictorial) perfection. So his romantic comedies and moral tales make you as coiled in suspense as you were during Murnau's Nosferatu or during the Alfred Hitchcock films that Rohmer famously made artistically viable in his work as an auteurist critic at the French film journal Cahiers du cinema. From Hitchcock, Rohmer learned the techniques of subjective cinema - but his critical, philosophical intelligence complicates it. It was perhaps never more explicitly essayed than in his voyeuristic screwball The Aviator's Wife, but that film informs the Jamesian challenge of centering this entire film's perspective on the experience of Gaspard--it plays like a chapter from The Golden Bowl. Rohmer shows us how the ideal woman of Gaspard's shanty song is as cracked as James' metaphorically loaded commodity. Gaspard appears in nearly every shot in the film. To my initial score taking, all the other shots signify his point of view. While this makes us sympathize with Gaspard, it also puts us at a critical distance--seeing him in perspective against the deep-focus surroundings. As with the deus ex machina that non-resolves the romantic plot, Rohmer's auteurist string-pulling puts Gaspard's professed beliefs and non-actions into relief. At the conclusion, Gaspard bemoans the mechanisms of fate that will never allow him to find love, but it's his failure of will that seals this fate. Rohmer, the auteur, challenges his character the way Margot challenges him - to earn that happiness, to earn her love, to achieve artistry in his life and work. It's the same dialectic his A Tale of Winter proved in the revelatory catharsis that film's heroine experienced at the performance of a Shakespeare play: the universe of fate and will is unified by faith. Rohmer not only tells a trenchant story of romantic foibles while also describing the Celtic origins of rock 'n roll and modern pop music, he shows us the relevance of one onto the other. and that relevance expands into everything, into what makes us human and into the cosmic. That's the soul of untainted pop, what Walter Hill understood in his gospel-impulse musical Streets of Fire, what Terence Davies explores in his pomo metaphysical musical The Long Day Closes: the way an individual mode of expression can capture and inspire the imaginations of the audience. In the scenes of Gaspard experimenting with shanty tropes on his guitar, of Lena singing "Santiano" on the beach, of Solene and company performing Gaspard's shanty song on a boat, Rohmer gets closer to re-inventing the musical genre than Bazz Luhrmann ever will with the insipid, disposable historical and artistic simplifications of Moulin Rouge. As a farewell, Gaspard says to Margot: "I'll never forget our talks." Neither will we. |
Gaspard meets Margot while on holiday
Solene and Gaspard
Gaspard and Solene sing about a pirate
Gaspard and Margot
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