Of the films I've seen by Eric Rohmer, all of them good, A Tale of Springtime must be the most enchanting. It is simply a very understated, unsentimental and beautiful little big film. As I've written here before, Rohmer has a unique sense for everyday life. Not only is this shown in his rejection of conventional narratives, but also in the way he builds a scene. In the beginning of Springtime, we see a girl walk up a long stairway. She arrives at the door, unlocks it, an enters an apartment. The apartment is messy. Stuff is shoddily placed everywhere. She starts to pick up some things, then hesitates. We see her thinking. She puts a shirt back on a chair, just as it was before. Then she walks out of the apartment. I mean - very little seem to go on here - yet it is a scene so packed with emotions and significance. How often do we see people hesitate, think, leave things undone in movies? Rohmer does not use big gestures to show that his character has second thoughts about doing whatever she is doing. He manages to keep the scene very open-ended. We never know what will happen next. This is characteristic of the entire movie, which in its winding events always surprises me. Despite its complete immersion in the everyday, the film never becomes banal. No - not despite - because of its immersion in everyday life, the film succeeds in revealing very subtle dimensions of how we enter into a situation, how a situation is open-ended but not non-specific. When the ending credits roll, the destiny of the characters have not been sealed. Rohmer's film end at a positive, and very uncommon, note: life goes on. 'Life', here, is not drudgery or the everyday grind. Life is whatever happens to us and how we react to these things so that new situations appear.
Jeanne, who is a philosophy lycée teacher, meets Natascha at a boring party. She tells Natascha about her present situation: her boyfriend is away (it is his messy apartment we saw in the beginning of the film) and her cousin lives at her own apartment. Natascha invites her to stay at her place. Hesitatingly, she agrees (the way we agree to things partly because of the enthusiasm with which the offer has been made) and they leave. -- This very non-dramatic event lead to a series of other non-dramatic, but intricate, events. Rohmer looks at human tensions without aspirations of 'universal feelings' and so on. His film lets particular people be particular people - this makes it a stunning movie. Bossy Natascha has a problematic relation to her father, but an even more conflictual relation to the young mistress of her father's. It is clear from early on that she nurses a wish that Jeanne could maybe 'compete' with the mistress. But Rohmer treads, I think, carefully here. Natascha is not depicted as outright scheming. Instead, we see how she thinks a lot of things, she says a lot of nonsense, she gives she impression of thinking some things. As in the initial scene in the apartment, Rohmer gives a very careful, complex picture of what 'thinking' can be. Thinking can be hesitation, 'now, what do I think about this?' but it can also be a way to take responsibility 'this is what I think'. It sounds boring perhaps to say that Rohmer studies human psychology, but I would still say he does, in a non-stereotypical way.
From the things I had been told about Springtime, I had some worries. Would the director indulge in philosophical rambling? Even though there were a few discussions about Kant and so on, these discussions did not have the appearance of intellectual embellishment. The discussion were very much a part of the situation at hand, in which some people want to show off, other again are intrigued by thoughts, others bored by a topic that seems alien to them. - Rather than Springtime trying to emulate clinical epistemology, philosophical epistemology should try to be more like Springtime in its approach to 'knowledge', 'pretension', 'self-deception', 'thinking'. This film teaches me more about what it is to know or not know than would any of the mainstream books in analytical philosophy.
Another merit of Springtime is how settings are so personally and intimately established. Just a few seconds into peeking into an apartment or a summer house yard, the audience is already inhabiting a particular place. Even during the short scenes where a pretty drab Paris is reflected through car windows, the settings are not reduced to function or mood.
Springtime is the best film I've seen in a long time.
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