A Summer’s Tale

A Summer’s Tale

Critics often called Eric Rohmer an American arthouse favorite, but sometimes the exhibitors servicing the American arthouse would have nothing to do with him. In the ’90s, U.S. fans of Rohmer could see only three of his “Tales of Four Seasons,” those set in Winter, Spring and Autumn (the Autumn entry was singled out for particular praise, and to my recollection got the widest distribution). He didn’t skip summer. For some reason his tale of that season never made it here.

Until now. The 1996 “A Summer’s Tale” opens today in America, and having a previously unseen work by Rohmer in a movie theater is like well, it’s like basking in June sunshine. This is a story of some good looking, self-conscious but not very self-aware young adults being romantic around each other at a beach town on the North coast of France one of his latter day pictures, that is.

And as usual with this filmmaker‘s work from about “Claire’s Knee” on through “A Tale of Winter,” his gifts for using young people’s mercurial predilections as a springboard for smart but genially unoppressive philosophical inquiry are almost uncanny; here he tackles what the Lovin’ Spoonful once called “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?”

Gaspard (stick-thin curly-haired Melvil Poupaud) arrives at the beach town where he’ll be on holiday for the summer and doesn’t do much for three days. Indeed, nothing happens in this movie for quite some time: Gaspard meets Margot (Amanda Langlet), a cute waitress who has grown up considerably since playing Pauline opposite Arielle Dombasle‘s Marion in 1983’s “Pauline At The Beach”; then he goes back to his flat and plays guitar; then he takes walks on the beach and waits for the phone to ring.

Margot, who studies ethnology, tries to draw Gaspard out; she seems flirtatious, but maybe not; he has a girlfriend named Lena (Aurelia Nolin), whom he was supposed to meet up with on this trip, but she seems to have forgotten or lost track of the plan.

So after rebuffing Gaspard’s tentative advances Margot urges him to go after Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who is vivacious and interested in everything; so naturally they hit it off like gangbusters (“You might not think so but I do have principles,” Margot assures him at one point); which success makes Margot ill humoredly jealous. And then Lena shows up in town.

Gaspard started his vacation without a love interest. Now he has three.

Attempting to handle his daughters, Gaspard fails to see that he’s plunging into the morass of small untruths. And as he becomes more secure in himself, he only grows more intolerable. When one sees the mostly sunny and sardonically bright surface layer of this image, one is struck by Rohmer’s acute understanding of how young people can be such drama kings and queens. But just beneath that level lies an ironic fable about how everyone at any age uses their love lives to build themselves up or tear themselves down.

The deus ex machina that saves Gaspard from having to face (some of) his mistakes is both totally fitting and pretty funny, appealing to current-day hipsters and those acquainted with them even though the movie itself is almost two decades old now. Some tropes never die out.

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