Post by StevePulaski on Oct 31, 2017 20:34:04 GMT -5
A Tale of Winter (1992)
Directed by: Éric Rohmer
Directed by: Éric Rohmer
Charlotte Véry and Hervé Furic.
Rating: ★★½
Éric Rohmer's dialog often has a melodic quality to it. In some ways, the American equivalent to Rohmer's perceptive screenwriting talents and distinct human interest would be Richard Linklater. Linklater similarly finds the complexities of a story spawned by two people meeting and exchanging ideas about philosophy, emotions, and love.
Both directors' films bear idealistic qualities rather than realistic ones. Few strangers or even formal acquaintances babble at length about aforementioned topics while preparing Christmas dinner, and in Linklater's case, few college-age men would even be burdened to adopt the kind of soft, empathetic ways he often ascribes to them. The beauty comes in that both Rohmer and Linklater operate like they couldn't care less about being realistic. By adopting lengthy conversations and making them centerpieces in a series of loose films, they touch on something so rarely present in film.
Rohmer's A Tale of Winter - the second installment in his quartet of films revolving around particular seasonally specific love stories - is, like its spring-set predecessor, not a great movie. Its dialog, yet again, sometimes plods along wit a repetitive monotone and the focus gets muddied with the presence of so many characters. But like A Tale of Springtime, it has flashes of quaint brilliance, such as the inclusion of William Shakespeare's play "A Winter's Tale," which serves as a climactic realization for our main character as she comes to grips with her complex love-life and tumultuous situation.
She's Félicie, and she's played by Charlotte Véry, a woman who met the love of her life, promised to stay in contact with him, fell victim to a misspelled address, and remains lonely but convinced that he'll one day stumble into her life once again. The man was Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche), whom she met on vacation, and five years after they met, she still harbors feelings and perhaps a sense of delusion that she'll get a second chance. Over the last several years, Félicie has taken time to get to know other men, Maxence (Michel Voletti) and Loïc (Hervé Furic), two men who harbor a modest sense of self-awareness that they are unfit to be her mate simply because they are not Charles. Maxence possesses a happily creative side in his life, while Loïc is sometimes bitterly pragmatic, holding his intellectually tendencies close to him but just distant enough so that he's not exposed for masquerading as the smartest man in the room.
Rohmer's movies are often grouped with an overarching idea to string them along, although they do not require a stern order in which to view them. Most of his work in the 1960s went to furthering his project "Six Moral Tales," a series of six brief stories about a man who falls in love with a different woman each installment. After the completion of A Tale of Winter, he reached the halfway point in his "Tales of Four Seasons" quartet, which took up most of his energy in the 1990s before redirecting it on some stand-alone projects and other short films. Just by watching any Rohmer film, discarding the order or period in which it was made, you get the feeling that he was a man who was always thinking and listening, sometimes to a fault. You can easily envision him eating lunch in the park one day, pausing for a moment to overhear the ramblings of a couple's conversations, and then walking home to begin cranking out a screenplay over a manual typewriter. His process is so human that you can practically pinpoint the way in which his projects were conceived.
It's been difficult to articulate why these first two films set in their respective seasons have failed to captivate me like Pauline at the Beach, later work of his that's comically lively and brilliant. Perhaps Rohmer's commitment to writing intellectual discussions for his characters to indulge in like a decadent display of sweets leaves me gassed after a lengthy period of time; A Tale of Winter is an upwards of two hours and its gears are grinding, albeit somewhat greased, when the Shakespeare climax arrives. The film, like all three Rohmer films I've seen up until this point, have moments of unrefined beauty, such as the way this film is a long idealization of "what could've been" and the way time bleeds into our minds not only to disillusion us and hamper our progress but make us yearn for times and people we might've thought were better than they were. The fact that they are not in our lives anymore is something that's often guilty of manipulating our conscience to think/believe a certain way. A Tale of Winter is often a nice movie, I just wish it was a bit nicer and more compelling, without an evident fear of structure.
Starring: Charlotte Véry, Michel Voletti, Frédéric van den Driessche, and Hervé Furic. Directed by: Éric Rohmer.