Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle

Rohmer made this in 1987 outside both of his great cycles, on 16mm, with two young non-professionals he had met and liked, and almost no money. It is four self-contained episodes about the same pair, and it is the most experimental thing in his filmography while looking like the most casual.

Mirabelle, a student from Paris, gets a puncture in the countryside and is rescued by Reinette, who lives alone in a farmhouse and paints. Reinette wants Mirabelle to hear the blue hour — the minute before dawn when, she claims, every animal and insect stops at once and there is complete silence. They become friends and Reinette moves to Paris to study art. The remaining episodes are small moral problems: a café bill and a rude waiter, a beggar and a shoplifter and the question of who deserves what, and finally an art dealer whom Reinette must sell paintings to on a day she has sworn a vow of silence.

Each is essentially a philosophical dialogue in disguise, which is Rohmer's lifelong method, but the tone here is looser and funnier than usual, and Joëlle Miquel's Reinette — earnest, absolutely certain, frequently wrong — is a marvellous creation. It is the Rohmer to give someone who thinks Rohmer will be austere.