Boyfriends and Girlfriends

The last of Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs, made in 1987 and set almost entirely in Cergy-Pontoise, one of the new towns built outside Paris in the 1970s. Rohmer, who was fascinated by planned urban space, shoots the concrete plazas, artificial lake and glass walkways as though they were a landscape, which is part of the joke and part of the point.

Blanche works for the town council and is painfully unsure of herself. Léa is doing a computing degree, is entirely sure of herself, and adopts Blanche as a friend. Blanche is in love with Alexandre, who is Léa's friend; Léa is drifting away from Fabien, who is increasingly interested in Blanche. Nobody states any of this. Instead they discuss it in the abstract, over lunch, in the pool, on a windsurfing trip, in the exact register of people who are arranging their lives while pretending to be describing them.

Rohmer colour-codes the four leads' clothing throughout — greens, blues, reds — with a rigour that becomes very funny once you notice it. It is the lightest of his films and one of the most precisely observed: a comedy of manners about a generation with total freedom to say what they want and no vocabulary for doing it. The proverb of the title, given in the opening card, gives the whole plot away and does not spoil a thing.