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"A Summer's Tale", 2014 U.S. theatrical release; New reviews
Topic Started: Jun 22 2014, 01:27 PM (723 Views)
pabs
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Perhaps of interest, this is a new review of A Summer's Tale (publ. 19th of June, 2014, in The New Yorker) on the occasion of its (long, long, long) long-awaited first release in American cinemas:

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Two of the most important openings tomorrow are the work of veteran directors, only one of whom is alive to witness the event. The first is Clint Eastwood’s “Jersey Boys,” which I’ll revisit soon; the second is “A Summer’s Tale,” the late Eric Rohmer’s lyrical romance, from 1996, which is only now getting its long-overdue theatrical release. (My capsule review is in the magazine this week.) Rohmer made the film in the summer of 1995, at the age of seventy-five. (He died in 2010.) This film is one of the many great foreign films from the nineties that, owing to a confluence of forces—including the closing of art-house theatres, competition from home video, and increasing print-advertising costs—never came out here. (The long list also includes such films as another, perhaps even greater, film of Rohmer’s, “The Tree, the Mayor, and the Médiathèque,” as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague,” Philippe Garrel’s terrifyingly terminal “Night Wind,” co-starring Catherine Deneuve, and Noémie Lvovsky’s scourging romantic drama “Forget Me.”)

Coincidence plays a large role in Rohmer’s work, in particular in “A Summer’s Tale,” the story of a young man—a mathematician who spends much of his time writing and performing music—who, while awaiting his girlfriend in Dinard, a resort town in Brittany, gets involved with two other young women whom he meets there. And, when considering the coincidental release of this film alongside “Jersey Boys,” some peculiar coincidences turned up.

Both of these movies are about young people who dream of a career in the music business while working in other fields. Both movies were made by directors who got relatively late starts as directors—Rohmer directed his first feature, “The Sign of Leo,” in 1959, at the age of thirty-nine, and Eastwood made his first, “Play Misty for Me,” in 1970, at forty. Both of those first features are centered on music. “The Sign of Leo” is about a violinist and composer who suddenly runs out of money and becomes homeless; “Play Misty for Me” is about a jazz d.j. who is stalked by a listener. Both directors have lifelong fascinations with music. Eastwood is a skilled jazz pianist who has also composed music for some of his films, and has made one of the best jazz movies ever, “Bird.” Rohmer also played piano and, while he was making “A Summer’s Tale,” he was writing a remarkable book about music, “From Mozart to Beethoven” (released in 1996), in which he expressed ideas about artistic classicism that apply to his approach to movies as well.

Eastwood is, and Rohmer was, politically centrist-to-conservative. In the fifties, Rohmer exhibited Royalist leanings, and when he edited Cahiers du Cinéma, in the early sixties, he kept a batch of overtly right-wing writers in its fold. “The Tree, the Mayor, and the Médiathèque” is openly skeptical of well-intended Socialist projects, and “The Lady and the Duke” is a skeptical look at the French Revolution. I’ve also seen a TV interview with him— from the mid-nineties, I think—in which he explains that, though he may not consider himself to be on the right, he’s also “not a leftist.”

Both directors have a fascination with the past—Eastwood’s cinematic reconstructions of the days of his youth, whether in “Changeling” or “Bird,” “White Hunter Black Heart” or “J. Edgar,” and, now, “Jersey Boys,” have a particular nuance and verve. And Rohmer …

Well, that’s where we get back to “A Summer’s Tale.” Rohmer recreated only rarely history in his features: only “Triple Agent,” a nineteen-thirties political drama, recreates a time within his memory. “A Summer’s Tale” is, in effect, a veiled period piece, a retrospective view of Rohmer’s own youth, involving a state of mind and a personal situation that corresponds closely to those that he experienced half a century earlier.

The protagonist of “A Summer’s Tale,” Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), explains to Margot (Amanda Langlet), a graduate student he meets on the beach, that he plans to become a teacher because, unlike a career in engineering, it would let him keep his time free to satisfy his musical ambitions. This is what Rohmer himself did: in the forties, he fulfilled the academic requirements to become a high-school teacher of French, and took a teaching job in the early nineteen-fifties in order to pursue a career as a film critic, editor, and director.

Gaspard is a walking cipher, a man without qualities, passing through life with a strange neutrality, holding himself in abeyance in anticipation of a vaguely glorious future. He starts the film with some of the longest silences in Rohmer’s dialectical œuvre, and his name isn’t even heard until midway through the movie. He relates to Margot the prediction of a graphologist, that he’d “come into his own” around the age of thirty. (In fact, it wasn’t until around the age of thirty that Rohmer—whose 1946 novel, “Élisabeth,” was a flop—began to come into his own, writing film criticism, running a film club, publishing a small magazine in which he published articles by his younger friends Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, and making movies independently.)

“A Summer’s Tale” features a scene—brief, but underlined by a shock cut away from it—in which Gaspard speaks of his musical ambitions with a young businessman, of his plans to make music the center of his life without making a living from it, without participating in the industry. It’s a clear yet subtle tribute to his life as an independent filmmaker, as an accidental success.

The movie ends (I’ll avoid spoilers) with a deft and decisive tribute to the moral virtue and romantic centrality of artistic ambition. And it features a lightning-sharp phrase—spoken, tellingly, not by Gaspard himself but by the perspicacious, intellectual Margot—that encapsulates, in two words, Rohmer’s character, his career, and his lifelong array of cinematic protagonists. At a moment when Gaspard expresses his doubts of his romantic prospects, she calls attention to his “negative confidence.” Of course, she means something like pessimism, his expectation of the worst—but what emerges is the ironic truth, the confidence that from self-denial, from refusal, from negation, from evasion, from self-effacement, from withdrawal, and from an active self-marginalization, a positive image will ultimately emerge.

Rohmer’s confidence in chance, in coincidence, is also a confidence in providence, in divine grace—albeit one that’s aided by a pure, if prickly and obstinate, will, even a negative one. In its singular vision of ambition and its intimate price, “A Summer’s Tale” is strangely similar to “Jersey Boys.”

------------------------------------


I can't comment on the journalist's comparisons, as I've not yet seen Jersey Boys.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/eric-rohmers-tribute-to-his-younger-self.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook
Edited by pabs, Jun 23 2014, 10:08 AM.
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New Review in The New York Times.


Torn by Three Loves and Styles of Jousting

‘A Summer’s Tale,’ From Eric Rohmer’s ‘Seasons’ Cycle / NYT Critics' Pick

By STEPHEN HOLDEN


JUNE 19, 2014


Eric Rohmer, the French New Wave master, was in his mid-70s when “A Summer’s Tale,” the third installment of his “Tales of the Four Seasons” cycle, was released abroad in 1996. The only one of the cycle’s four films not distributed in the United States, it is finally having an American release, and it was worth the wait.

Although “A Summer’s Tale” is only 18 years old, its pace is so measured, and the culture it surveys so placid and homogeneous, that superficially it now feels a half-century behind the times. Because the films of Rohmer, who died four years ago at 89, represent the ne plus ultra of a serene, thoughtful European classicism, this is a slightly mixed blessing. It includes no intimations of future shock, no harbingers of the jangly, wired-up 21st century. But without those distractions, “A Summer’s Tale” has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.

In the languid world of “A Summer’s Tale,” there is nary a sign of a computer. Telephone communication is conducted over landlines. The tempo of life in the Breton resort town of Dinard, where the story is set, is leisurely, and even the local nightclubbing is subdued. The bodies of the summer bathers are lithe and attractive but reveal no signs of aggressive fitness training or cosmetic enhancement.

The four main characters, all in their 20s, care about their appearances, but they don’t obsess about their looks. As they play the mating game, they are discreetly competitive but far from cutthroat. This gorgeous movie has such an exquisite sensitivity to subtle changes in the light and weather that it makes you feel as if you were living at the beach.

“A Summer’s Tale” focuses on the romantic coupling and uncoupling of Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), a lean, introverted, bushy-haired math student, aspiring musician and self-described loner suffering from what a therapist might call social anxiety disorder.

“I feel as if the world exists around me, but I’m not there,” he explains to Margot (Amanda Langlet), a gregarious ethnology student working for the summer as a waitress. “I don’t exist. I’m transparent, invisible.”

Although Margot has a boyfriend overseas, she latches on to Gaspard. As they go for long walks in which they discuss their romantic lives, she subtly signals her interest in being more than friends. It’s a knowing, witty depiction of an expertly deployed strategy of advance and retreat.

Their conversations are the spine of a screenplay in which every relationship is a paradoxical dialogue. The more precise and honest the characters try to be, the more they dissemble, often unknowingly. Rohmer captures like no other director a complicated mixture of innocence, impulsiveness and calculation in courtship. In these sophisticated romantic maneuvers, mind games take precedence over sex.

Gaspard has arrived in Dinard expecting to meet Léna (Aurélia Nolin), his sometime girlfriend, who isn’t there when he arrives. She has left no word of when she might appear. When she finally shows up without advance notice, she is a moody, imperious beauty who calls the shots and tells him that in the opinion of her cousins, he doesn’t “measure up.”

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
While waiting for her, Gaspard is pursued by Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), a friend of Margot’s who insists that they not sleep together immediately. Initially, at least, Gaspard is besotted. These three concurrent relationships tighten into an uncomfortable knot when Gaspard makes multiple commitments to accompany each woman on a short trip to the nearby island of Ouessant.


“A Summer’s Tale” shares a deep kinship with Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, whose first chapter, “Before Sunrise,” was released in 1995. Rohmer’s first seasonal film, “A Tale of Springtime,” came out in 1990. Both directors’ movies are dominated by their characters’ conversations, which have a way of going around in circles and turning into verbal chess matches.

Of the two, Rohmer is the more romantic. From a contemporary perspective, Rohmer’s reveries seem idyllic. As his characters chatter about their relationships, he views them with a keen critical eye tempered by a grandfatherly affection, and takes their amorous dilemmas almost as seriously as they do, while remaining at a polite distance. There are no indications of prurience. In Mr. Linklater’s films, each side erupts at any second, and the verbal combat can be noisy.

Rohmer’s movies exhibit the palpable yearning and nostalgia of a much older man looking back at youth through rose-tinted glasses. His world is very circumscribed. If you are white, well educated and comfortably situated, it may feel like heaven. But for everyone else, it is an exclusive gated community with 24-hour security.


A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’Été)

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Eric Rohmer; director of photography, Diane Baratier; edited by Mary Stephen; music by Philippe Eidel and Sébastien Erms; produced by Françoise Etchegaray and Margaret Ménégoz; released by Big World Pictures. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Melvil Poupaud (Gaspard), Amanda Langlet (Margot), Gwenaëlle Simon (Solène), Aurélia Nolin (Léna), Aimé Lefèvre (the Newfoundlander), Alain Guellaff (Uncle Alain), Evelyne Lahana (Aunt Maiwen), Yves Guérin (Accordionist) and Franck Cabot (Cousin).
Edited by pabs, Jun 23 2014, 07:21 AM.
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From The WRAP (http://www.thewrap.com/a-summers-tale-review-eric-rohmers-sun-kissed-bonbon-finally-arrives-in-the-u-s/)

By Alonso Duralde, June 19, 2014 @ 12:03 pm



‘A Summer's Tale’


Eric Rohmer's Sun-Kissed Bonbon Finally Arrives in the U.S.


This charming 1996 comedy of romantic misunderstandings from the late New Wave master remains witty and observant two decades later.

Discovering that there's a 1996 movie by Eric Rohmer, the French genius behind classics like “My Night at Maud's” and “Claire's Knee,” that's only now making it into U.S. theaters is like finding a $20 bill in an old pair of pants.

Actually, it's more like a $50 bill, since the movie in question is “A Summer's Tale,” a sprightly entry in his “Tales of the Four Seasons,” about a moody mathematician who claims to be inept with women but still winds up with a trio of jeunes filles orbiting around him by the end of his seaside vacation.

Make that a $50 bill and an old photo of a good friend: Melvil Poupaud, the film's leading man, has gone on to star in films for François Ozon, Zoe Cassavetes, Arnaud Desplechin, and Xavier Dolan, among others, and it's a treat to see this stalwart of French cinema in his fuzzy-haired, mid-20s glory.

In “A Summer's Tale” (the new HD restoration opens June 20 in New York City and July 18 in Los Angeles), Poupaud stars as Gaspard, a young graduate who's spending a few weeks at the beach before starting a new job. He's hoping that his “sort-of” girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin) will show up, but she's been deliberately vague about her plans. Gaspard meets waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, who played the title role in Rohmer's summer fling “Pauline at the Beach”), but it turns out she's got a Ph.D. in ethnology and is just making a little money during tourist season.

Margot and Gaspard clearly have chemistry, and they even kiss, but she swears fidelity to her boyfriend, currently working for the Peace Corps on the other side of the planet. Instead, the two go on long walks where Gaspard expounds on his romantic philosophy (“I have to be loved to be in love; since no one loves me, I don't love anyone.”) and generally moons about regarding his bad luck with women.

The wise Margot rolls her eyes at this, since Gaspard is winning her over while also managing to humble-seduce the alluring Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), even singing the latter a sea shanty about a pirate queen that he'd actually been writing for Lena. Lena, of course, eventually shows up, living up to her mercurial reputation but also indicating that Gaspard isn't the most honest and forthcoming person himself.

Rohmer has a rep for being a writer-director who allows his characters to talk, talk, talk, revealing their hopes and their insecurities and their foibles and their hypocrisies. It's an earned description, but since Rohmer is one of the cinema's greatest authors of dialogue, it's hardly a bad thing; it's also not entirely true, since the first 10 minutes or so of “A Summer's Tale” is virtually wordless, with Gaspard arriving and wandering around a resort town where he knows no one until Margot engages him on the beach.

Poupaud's been acting in film since the age of 10, but there's nothing of the former-child-star in his performance. He and Langlet have an easy, natural rapport, and he crafts a character who proclaims self-doubt and misery at every turn while proving irresistible to the women he keeps saying he can never win. Our opinions about Gaspard certainly change over the course of the film, but we remain invested in him.

Cinematographer Diane Baratier, a frequent Rohmer collaborator, never shoots the seaside like she's making a travelogue, but she nonetheless captures those clear days and gorgeous sunsets that make people return to the coast year after year. Even the interiors have that sun-through-faded-curtains intimacy of a well-used vacation house.

Smart, sexy, and sunny, “A Summer's Tale” remains as delightful as it was when I saw it at the 1996 Toronto Film Festival. Whether it's the closest you'll get to the beach this year, or you have to tear yourself away from the dunes to enjoy it, it's an essential part of any movie-lover's summer.


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Rohmer’s movies exhibit the palpable yearning and nostalgia of a much older man looking back at youth through rose-tinted glasses. His world is very circumscribed. If you are white, well educated and comfortably situated, it may feel like heaven. But for everyone else, it is an exclusive gated community with 24-hour security.


Says a 70-something Yale graduate bluebelly.
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A Summer's Tale

Theatrical Review

[Big World Pictures; 1996]

Director: Eric Rohmer

Runtime: 114 minutes


Written by Peter Labuza, June 20, 2014 at 1:00 pm, http://thefilmstage.com/


Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) arrives off a ferry and bustles up the road to the vacation house he will reside in for the next few weeks. He goes out for a quiet drink, avoids the bustling clubs, and returns to his apartment to tune a few notes on his guitar. It appears, for a while, that he won’t speak. What will bring this poor boy out of what seems like his purgatory? Luckily, Margot (Amanda Langlet), a pretty girl sporting a bright, red two-piece on the beach, invites him to chat. Once they start chatting, they will not stop.

A Summer’s Tale might be the sex comedy Eric Rohmer never intended to have branded as such, but his 1996 film – finally getting a US theatrical release in a rather fine digital restoration (more on that later) – is a piercingly funny work of indecision. It can be odd to think the then-77-year-old Rohmer making a film as fluidly natural about the awkward romance of those in their ‘20s, but such a distance allows the director to lure us into Gaspard’s philosophies and principles before showing him to be less the victim than the instigator of deserved troubles. Gaspard’s “woe is me” logic toward love blatantly obscures the treasures before him, so when his romantic entanglements legitimately begin to escalate, the flaws in his own character hit deeper than a work which only positions these failings as external.


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Rohmer’s conversational approach has defined most of his masterpieces (The Green Ray, My Night At Maud’s), but it’s not that his films are talky — it’s that they often seem to be veering off-course before almost bewitchingly coming upon a logical narrative action. When characters digress about their dispositions in real time, the moment the scene reaches its apex is a revalatory act, one that Rohmer asserts through a cut to a title card announcing the next day. It also develops plot on a natural path without evidently announcing the turns and twists of its melodrama — or, as Margot refers to them, “a habit of coincidences.” As it turns out, both Gaspard and Margot are in seemingly committed relationships: he to Lena (Aurelia Nolin), a seemingly fussy woman who may or may not show up in a week to join him; she to an unnamed archeologist halfway around the world. Although Rohmer plays with the will-they-or-won’t-they aspects of this relationship, he almost uses it as an excuse to have Gaspard reveal his own logic — a fear of love, his own justifications to remain at arms-length from others while simultaneously demanding that others give him all the affection he secretly desires. Margot goes for none of that, fortunately, and her playful gestures fill different roles for Gaspard: as a confessional companion for casual strolls; as a sexual foil, when one shot emphasizes her elongated leg in a Mrs. Robinson-like pose; as a trusted sidekick, when she wears a boyish hat; and as a paragon of romance, seen through a symbolic (and only symbolic) kiss.

Rohmer gets so much out of their long walks that it seems any desire for plot to commence might not be necessary. But Gaspard soon finds that this wallow for remaining unluckily in love is about to turn him on to a jackpot — a jackpot so large that he has no idea what to do with it. He first meets up with Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon), who gives him practically everything — except sex, at least not the first time; she has her principles, too — including a new obsession. Her own demands put a weight on him, however, Gaspard torn between what feels like a metaphysical love for the still-nonexistent Lise and what’s in front of him. (This is not even to mention Margot’s almost untenable contempt for his ghastly, unemotional logic in pondering how to convenience this inconvenient situation.) Things become even more complication (and cringe-inducingly comical) when the metaphysical becomes physical as Lise arrives. The airy seas and bright sun which seemed like an escape soon to turn into a prison, the skies becoming more cloudy and the rocks turning, it seems, into almost-alien colors.

What’s a guy to do! The comedy of it all probably wouldn’t work if Rohmer didn’t allow Gaspard to essentially hang his own gallows. While seemingly sympathetic, the further he dives into his high-wire plate-balancing act, the more obvious it becomes that Gaspard has no more interest in any of these women than whatever might be easy for him. He confesses to Margot that Solene must be the ideal woman, only to reveal one day on that it’s truly Lise, only to then decree his (platonic, but only out of suitability) relationship with Margot as what he truly desires. Rohmer’s camera plays with these rhythms, especially through the physical presences of his three actresses: Margot’s playful, bouncy energy; Solene’s direct and consuming kisses; and the zig-zag energy which brings Lise in and out of his frame. It might be easy to see why Gaspard can’t decide, but it’s also pathetic when his boyish looks always carry a weight of indecision as he moves around like a chicken missing its head.


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In the end, this delightful comedy is filled with a melancholy that releases tension through a sigh instead of a breath of fresh air. A convenient phone call saves him from an impossible decision, something Gaspard feels all too happy to revel in while Margot slowly unveils her true emotions through a physical gesture. Dan Sallitt notes that the “light-comic tone and an idyllic vacation ambience culminate in emptiness and desolation,” and it’s hard not to feel the pain accompanying these comic (and cosmic) gestures.

It’s all been beautifully preserved as well in this digital restoration; the colors pop off the screen while feeling perfectly authentic, and the motion moves without much trace of awkward static. Only the grain can look somewhat awkward against the tanned bodies and, especially, during night-set scenes — a necessary evil, given the constraints of non-celluloid restoration. To have what is certainly one of the finest comedies of the year — or any year — presented in very fine form is a delight, and a reminder that idle talk can be as thrillingly alive as visceral action.

A Summer’s Tale is currently in limited theatrical release.


(http://thefilmstage.com/reviews/review-a-summers-tale/)
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All these years it's taken for a US release? Better late than never. A typically light and summery Rohmer film, and quite sexy. Personally, not exactly as a Judgment of Paris beauty, but rather a compatability, contest, i would have chosen Amanda Langlet. When we lived in Brittany we liked going to Dinard, the more so for my having seen the film and sharing the characters' space. There's an unusual 1950s American style bar near the beach.

Of course there are similarities with several Rohmer films- Claire's Knee, Pauline at the Beach, The Green Ray, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend; like them and you'll probably like this
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I'm tempted to see it again now. It'd be something like my seventh rewatch. :sh: :$

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Rohmer’s movies exhibit the palpable yearning and nostalgia of a much older man looking back at youth through rose-tinted glasses. His world is very circumscribed. If you are white, well educated and comfortably situated, it may feel like heaven. But for everyone else, it is an exclusive gated community with 24-hour security.


Says a 70-something Yale graduate bluebelly.
Anyone who criticises Rohmer for being 'bourgeois' doesn't 'get' France. The thing is most of Rohmer's characters aren't all that privileged. They're 'educated' people perhaps, but they all seem to be living day-to-day attending to the demands of what appear to be meagrely paid professions. Marie Riviere's characters in The Aviator's Wife and The Green Ray are both secretaries and both live in 'chambres de bonne'. Frederic in Love in the Afternoon lives in a cramped apartment in the banlieues with his wife and kids. The characters in My Night at Maud's are all making ends meet in a second-rung provincial city where one can assume the cost of living isn't all the high with respect to Paris. Those are just a few examples.
Edited by Mars in Aries, Nov 7 2016, 01:59 PM.
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