A Summer's Tale

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a gift to filmgoers that so very few ever appreciated. Once he achieved financial independence with the foundation of Les Films du Losange, his own (and Barbet Schroeder’s) production company in 1962, he was free to make whatever film he pleased, with no consideration for “audience appeal” or “entertainment values.” It helped, of course, that his films had enough esthetic appeal to attract critical attention. And he won plenty of festival awards over the span of a very long career. These encouraged enough people to seek out his work, but, as indicated, not so many. Only one of his films, My Night at Maud’s, broke through the $1M ceiling at the box office. A Summer’s Tale (Un conte d’été, 1996) Rohmer’s twenty-first feature film, made just $318,739. 

He has an affinity with summer and with summer’s prime destination, the beach. La Collectionneuse (1967), the 3rd of his Six Moral Tales and his first film in color, was set in St. Tropez in the south of France. My Night at Maud’s ends on an island (Belle Ile en mer, “beautiful island on the sea” no less) off the Bretagne coast. Pauline at the Beach was filmed in Jullouville, just up the coast from Mont St. Michel. A Summer’s Tale is set not far from there, in Saint-Malo and Dinard. As I wrote more than a decade ago, “[Rohmer’s] foremost quality is an intellectualized sensuality, where the one invariably nullifies the other.” The seaside is the best place for a filmmaker to elicit sensuality in his characters, creating a sexy pretext in which to juxtapose quasi-philosophical discussions. It may perhaps have to do with his characters seeing one another nearly naked, or else it’s the heat and the relaxed pace of vacationers. 

Philosophy is taken far more seriously by the French, and Rohmer’s characters take pride in their ability to talk about their emotional lives. It is also the source of most of the humor, since the people in his films invariably talk a better game than they’re capable of living up to. It gives them an air of mastery over perfectly inexplicable behavior. 

Take Gaspard, for instance, the male lead character in A Summer’s Tale, played by Melvil Poupaud. He arrives in Saint-Malo with a backpack and guitar and moves into a room to which he has a key (it belongs to a friend). He doesn’t speak a word until nearly eight minutes of the film have expired. He says them to Margot, a waitress at a local créperie (played by Amanda Langlet, who was such a disarming presence thirteen years earlier in Pauline at the Beach). Gaspard and Margot meet by chance one day on the beach and they start a conversation. Her attraction to him isn’t returned, but as we quickly learn, Gaspard isn’t subject to any strong emotions. She invites him to a dance club, but he dances alone until finally sitting down to watch everyone else enjoy themselves. He has a clumsy way of crossing his arms and raising his fingers to his face, like he’s going to bite his nails. 

After expressing her interest in him, during one of many long walks around the coast, Gaspard informs Margot that he’s waiting for his girlfriend, Lena, to join him. Meanwhile, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), a local beauty, has a go at Gaspard. Like a ton of bricks. Gaspard succumbs, while still awaiting Lena. Not exactly a love quadrangle (Gaspard has a Math degree), but an interesting quandary for a youth as callow as Gaspard. Just as he finds that he must choose one of these women (he repeatedly mentions taking one of them to Ouessant, a somewhat distant and – presumably – magical island), a friend sends him miraculous deliverance in the form of an 8-track recorder at an affordable price, and Gaspard, who insists that his music must come first, gratefully departs to purchase it. Margot sees him off at the ferry. On the soundtrack, Gaspard sings a sea shanty he has written, apparently, for just such an occasion. The action of the film lasts only three weeks, July 17 (today's date) to August 6. 

Rohmer didn’t discover his “style” as early as one might think. He made his first short film in 1950 and his first feature film in 1959. He is best known for the last four of his Six Moral Tales, La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, and Love in the Afternoon. Practically all of his films since then have been thematically and visually similar. A Summer’s Tale has no surprises. Even for a seasoned cinephile, Rohmer’s films are difficult because they rely so much on faces and voices. The beach locations are eye-grabbing, but they serve only as a scenic backdrop. 

I must admit it was an effort on my part to take an interest in these young people – not so much because of the difference in age (Rohmer was older than me – 76 – when he made A Summer’s Tale), but the focus of attention almost entirely on the moment, the sensations, the mood, the contact with others one’s own age. Rohmer said he based his script on memories of his time as a young film student. He admitted that he is uncomfortable in the company of people over 40, but I think his interest in young people is due to their nascent qualities – traits of which they are barely even aware. You could call it simply naïveté, if that word didn’t feel so out of date. Older men and women are too cautious, perhaps, for a Rohmer film. 

A commendable quality in Rohmer’s films is his choice of actors (or nonactors). The three women actors in A Summer's Tale, Amanda Langlet, Gwenaëlle Simon, and Aurelia Nolin, are far more interesting – more watchable – than Melvil Poupaud, one of the most callow of Rohmer’s leading men. But this was probably intentional. When Gaspard manages to evade the consequences of his triple dealing, even when it is Margot who sees him off, it can’t have come as much of a surprise to Solène or Lena. 

One of Cesare Pavese’s earliest novels was called The Beach (La Spiaggia), about a group of male friends and an attractive woman one of them introduces to the group at a summer retreat. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it “the comic ghost of a tragic love story.” Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale catches the fleeting insouciance of the season, and is memorable without being consequential.