A Summer's Tale

I think this film is brilliant enough for me to give it five stars - maybe I’ve just become too careless with my affection and thrust my praise onto everything that I like these days, I don’t know. But A Summer’s Tale is a film which, perhaps to a greater degree than all other Rohmer films, pierces through to the absolute depths of its characters without ever seeming to take any massive leaps or narrative turns in one direction or another, in a manner which is so typically Rohmerian in its subtlety, that even after having experienced it so many times in watching his other works, it still completely reeled me in. Even after seeing eight of his films now, it still totally bemuses me how practically all of his films, which are generally just depictions of the idle events, banal conversations, and complicated love lives of young holidayers in France, manage to spin such intense narrative complexity out of such seemingly trivial plots. In this film especially, I think Rohmer works at the absolute highest level of narrative excellence. A Summer’s Tale is where Rohmer’s narrative formula is at its most effective, where the inter-connecting, minute nuances of his script are at their most elaborate and substantial, and where the overall effect that this elicits by the end is most powerful. I could point to any number of individual things, but the telephone scene at the end is so excellently written and so cleverly brings together all the ever-loosening strands of the plot that even after having mulled over the film for a day, I’m still in awe of it. Stylistically as well, Rohmer’s use of film language is evidently far superior in his later than in his earlier work. Rohmer’s later films still remain deeply-embedded in realism and still eschew any notions of formalism or stylisation, but the camerawork is more purposeful, the editing is more intelligent, and even the use of sound is more effective. Considering the fact that Rohmer’s scripts were always incredibly strong (indeed I genuinely believe there is a case for him to be listed as one of the absolute greatest screenwriters of all time), this elevation in his use of film form is transformative for his work. There is a reason, I think, why all the other directors of the right bank of the Nouvelle Vague fell off overtime, yet Rohmer continued to grow, both in terms of his actual cinema and commercially. His work speaks for itself.