Post by StevePulaski on Oct 13, 2017 11:00:17 GMT -5
A Tale of Springtime (1990)
Directed by: Éric Rohmer
Directed by: Éric Rohmer
Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) and Natacha (Florence Darel) in A Tale of Springtime.
Rating: ★★½
Two women meet at a house party, striking conversation amongst the noise and coming to the realization that their humble musings on life and romance are more interesting than anything going on in the background. The two women, one, Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), a philosophy teacher, and the other, Natacha (Florence Darel), a piano student, head back to Natacha's apartment at her request. Her father is always away on business, and Jeanne is already looking for a place to crash after a recent breakup. She opts for Natacha's apartment, but wakes up the next morning surprised at the brief arrival of Igor (Hugues Quester), Natacha's father, gathering some clothes for a business trip.
Natacha's plan to set her father up with a plain but kind philosophy teacher comes through in spurts, fully revealing itself when we're acquainted with Ève (Eloïse Bennett), his domineering lover. A brief scene of her slicing potatoes while smoking a cigarette shows her carelessness and her reciprocated contempt for Natacha, all while Igor and Jeanne sit in the background. He is an architect who was once a fantastic writer, implored to stop by his wife and further compounded by his current lover. He kept rewriting and redrafting a piece that repeatedly changed focus in his mind, but Jeanne appreciates his sweet sensitivity that does a little to explain Natacha's personality, despite him not being as emotional as she is.
A Tale of Springtime is the first installment in director Éric Rohmer's "Contes des quatre saisons" (Tales of the Four Seasons) series, a quartet of odes to the respective seasons by focusing on a different set of characters during a particular time. One might be a bit surprised to see how little the spring season actually plays into the narrative of Rohmer's debut for the series. There's one scene involving the two ladies exploring Natacha's garden, where she says how the surrounding grass needs to be mowed on a regular basis or else it begins to look like a swamp and reminds herself that her trellis needs to be painted sometime this season. The scenic beauty of the season is surprisingly kept to a minimum; its only relevance in the narrative is that love is in the air, sort of.
Rohmer's movies often focus on characters meandering through life and stumbling into meaningful conversations that challenge their views on romance, existentialism, and philosophy. Simple conversations amongst the bourgeois class in relatively plain settings do their part to engender the values of these characters more-so than any narration or hastily written backstory could. Rohmer's strongest works (Pauline at the Beach still standing as my present favorite) find a way to mix in situational comedy with a deep appreciation for the human spirit. As a result, however his films live and die by the strengths and weaknesses of his respective characters, and A Tale of Springtime flounders by spending a bit too much time with characters that don't always appear worthy of examination for such an extended period of time.
For how much they talk about their feelings, Jeanne predictably bearing the most complex train of thought given her discipline, Natacha is one of several characters who isn't drawn with great depth. Her character's role as a device bleeds through much of her complexity as we realize we must endure her musings for a lengthy periods before we can get the climactic conversation between Jeanne and Igor. Even Igor feels like a disconnected party, a flat and boring everyman we meet maybe five or ten years too late, when his disillusionment clouds any kind of noteworthy observations he might've been capable of making regarding the human condition.
Moments sparkle and lines of dialog crackle like a fire, but it all amounts to a slight slice-of-life from Rohmer, who is capable of penning more developed characters - ones I hope see take the lead in this love-letter to the four seasons as it unfolds over the course of the 1990s.
Starring: Anne Teyssèdre, Hugues Quester, Florence Darel, Eloïse Bennett, and Sophie Robin. Directed by: Éric Rohmer.