Conte d’été (A Summer's Tale)

This maths student and musician is waiting for his girlfriend Léna to arrive when he is approached on the beach by Margot, an ethnology student who has a summer job at her aunt’s snack bar. Her boyfriend is also away. Margot is soon drawn to the reserved Gaspard, who admits that Léna doesn’t treat him very well. However, their initially platonic relationship is disrupted by the arrival of the voluptuous Solène.

Gaspard tries to follow his fluctuating feelings as honestly and logically as possible, but becomes increasingly entangled in his own reasoning. Eventually, everything becomes so complicated that he is rebuffed three times. His fundamental problem is that he does not know how to be himself. He functions neither within a group nor in an intimate situation with one of the girls. His insecurity makes him indecisive. It is as if he allows himself to be guided by what he himself calls ‘l’habitude du hasard’. Because of his hesitations and contradictions, the women describe him in turn as naïve, cynical, innocent and shrewd. Rohmer almost portrays him as an ‘anti-hero of the will’, someone who postpones choices until reality makes them for him.

Poupaud – who later became a regular in the films of Raoul Ruiz and François Ozon – delivers one of the strongest performances of his illustrious career here.With his natural charm and understated performance, he lends his fickle character a certain integrity, whilst the character’s behaviour remains at once opportunistic, self-centred and slightly manipulative. It is noteworthy that Poupaud plays the only young male protagonist in Rohmer’s oeuvre here. Perhaps his own fluid attitude towards identity plays a part in this: he fits in perfectly with the three ‘Rhomeriennes’ who move through the film with such grace. Moreover, Rohmer deliberately exploits the resemblance between actor and character: just like Gaspard, Poupaud is a musician, which further blurs the line between fiction and reality.

As always, Rohmer knows how to transform the seemingly banal aspects of romantic relationships into something enchanting and precious in a literary sense. He films the tribulations of his searching, introspective young hero with a grace and lightness that almost conceal how carefully this round dance of chance encounters and objective inevitability has been constructed.

The film opens with Gaspard arriving in Dinard with his travel bag and guitar. In the room he happened to secure through a friend, he immediately sets up his guitar and arranges his music cassettes with great precision. Music will play an important role throughout the film: it intersects, influences or sometimes hinders the romantic entanglements, until Gaspard is ultimately forced to make a choice.

Whilst waiting for Léna, he fills his days with long walks, conversations and intimate exchanges with Margot. Their walks along the rocky coast of Dinard perfectly illustrate how Rohmer integrates his characters into their natural surroundings – a setting that also defines the loose, seemingly effortless mise-en-scène. Structured as a chronicle – with the days of the two-month holiday passing as if in a diary – the film is bathed in a warm summer atmosphere. In this, it ties in with earlier works such as La Collectionneuse, Le Genou de Claire and Pauline à la plage.

Rohmer could also count on four young actors who perfectly play off one another during the delightful wordplay.
He even goes so far as to integrate quasi-documentary digressions into the fiction, often centring on Gallo-Breton ethnology and sea shanties about pirates and buccaneers. There is, for instance, the song that Gaspard composes on the spot for his Dulcinée. Through these detours, Conte d’été becomes perhaps Rohmer’s most autobiographical film: a work in which he makes the emergence of a life’s destiny palpable.

To give an idea of Rohmer’s consistently unobtrusive style, it is often said that no one ever remembers a single camera movement from his films. Ironically, Conte d’été does contain a complex camera movement – a moment of which the director himself was proud in interviews.

At 1 hour 53 minutes, this is also the longest film within the three cycles that make up the bulk of his oeuvre. But despite its length, it remains, from start to finish, pure enjoyment.

- Patrick Duynslaegher