A Summer's Tale

The third of Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons, made when he was seventy-six and shot in Dinard on the Brittany coast in the summer of 1995, in sequence, in the actual weeks the film covers. It played Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1996 and is the most purely enjoyable film in the cycle.

Gaspard, played by Melvil Poupaud, is a maths graduate with a guitar and no plans, waiting for Léna to arrive from Spain. She may not. He meets Margot, an ethnology student working in her aunt's crêperie, and they establish the kind of intense, talkative friendship that both parties insist is only a friendship. Then there is Solène. Gaspard, faced with the possibility of a decision, agrees to everything and commits to nothing. Diane Baratier shot it in bright coastal light, and Rohmer's dialogue — recorded live, sounding improvised, in fact written to the word — does everything.

Amanda Langlet, who had played the teenager in Pauline at the Beach thirteen years earlier, gives the performance the film rests on: Margot sees Gaspard completely and keeps talking to him anyway. Rohmer's comedy has always been about people who explain themselves at length in order to avoid understanding themselves, and no other film of his lets that run quite so gently or so long.