Pauline at the Beach
Pauline à la plage
France 1983, 35 mm, 94'
directed by Eric Rohmer
screenplay Eric Rohmer
cinematography Néstor Almendros
music Jean-Louis Valéro
sound Georges Prat
editing Cecile Decugis
cast Amanda Langlet, Arielle Dombasle, Pascal Greggory, Féodor Atkine, Simon de La Brosse, Rosette
producer Margaret Ménégoz
production Les Films Ariane
Pauline wants to fall in love, and she gets to know and gets used to the rules of seduction in the company of adults. A unique observation of the sentimental games played by people and the poetry of quotidian life. Or to put it the Rohmerianway: there’s always someone interested in somebody interesting to somebody else.
About to divorce from her husband, Marion decides to spend the end of summer together with her cousin Pauline in the family mansion in Grandville. There, she meets Pierre, an old flame who is – after five years – still in love with her, and his friend Henri, an ethnologist and genuine Casanova. One night, she rejects Pierre, who torments her with his passionate love confessions, and spends the night with Henri. The following day, Pauline meets Sylvain, a boy her own age, and makes out with him at Henri’s villa…
One of the most popular films by the great French filmmaker; apparently an easy-going, intelligent, eloquent sea comedy of errors combined with summer romance, but deep underneath, a moving emotional drama, a true love thriller!
“Everything has two sides, even virtue.” Balzac
“The same as in Dreyer's The Word (Ordet), where Johannes believes himself to be Jesus Christ because he has studied too intensively Kierkegaard, Rohmer’s characters also read too much and believe themselves to be somebody else; the same as Johannes, they too expect a miracle to give their life – what is left of it – a meaning. But Rohmer’s world is not that of Dreyer’s, inhabited by demigods, saints, lunatics, prophets or dead people brought back to life. His world is rather the world of hesitators and cowards, the inhabitants of limbo. And yet this apparently everyday world is divulged by shadows of anxiety and insanity – rather than loud and furious, this is more of a discreet insanity that is, notwithstanding, disturbing enough. People live under the tyranny of words that, in addition to duplicating and judging, also sometimes substitute for action. As to the miracle – if they do expect it, it is usually a tiny, trivial miracle that – despite not being noticed by all – is nevertheless within reach: a blue watch, a green ray or something similar; a momentary appearance, a flash that illuminates an individual’s entire life with the light of eternity, a grand finale, the uncertain experience of which – at least this is what they say – has happened to them. We often get the sensation that we are dealing with artificial comedies, but the truth is completely different: Rohmer’s films are first of all thrillers, films with an enigma. Their plots always revolve around a mystery. We would love to call them simply mysteries.”
Pascal Bonitzer
“What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either, with all due respect to the partisans of pure cinema who would speak with images as a deaf-mute does with his hands. After all, I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, yet that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature. It is true that I could write the stories I film. The proof is that I did write them, long ago, before I discovered cinema. But I was not satisfied with them, because I was unable to write them well enough. That’s why I filmed them. I was searching for a style, but I didn’t look to people like Stendhal, Constant, Mérimée, Morand, Chardonne or any of the others of whom you claim I am a disciple. I read these people very little or not at all; whereas I never stop re-reading Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Meredith or Proust: rich, prolix, involved writers. They present me with a world living its own life. I love them and read them often, just as I go to movies often; they, too, reveal life to me. And when I film, I try to extract as much from life as possible, in order to fill out the line of my argument. I no longer think about this argument, which is just a framework, but about the material with which I flesh it out, such as the landscapes where I situate my story and the actors I choose to act in it. The choice of these natural elements, and the way I can hold them in my net without altering their momentum, absorbs most of my attention.”
Eric Rohmer, Letter to a Critic, La Nouvelle Revue Française 219, March 1971
Eric Rohmer
Eric Rohmer is considered the most productive, tenacious and persistent of all talents that came out of the French New Wave cinema in early 1960s. Together with his colleagues from the said period (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette), Rohmer initially navigated the film waters as a renowned publicist at Cahiers du Cinéma and afterwards – armed with theoretical knowledge and a clear notion of what film should look like – he dedicated his body and soul to writing books, writing film scripts based on his works and directing his own scripts. He made his name with a series of apparently easy-going comedies and chamber dramas distinguished by economical direction, excellent dialogue, extraordinary feeling for casting and guidance of actors, warm irony and a fully unpretentious moral statement incorporated in each and every one of his films. He joins individual films into cycles, including Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons. Years of on-going work haven’t cost him a bit of his acute spirit, and he delivers with each new film ever more valuable life experience.
Schedule:
- Thursday, 9. 6., 23.00, Open-Air Cinema MANZIOLI
