It is crucial that A Tale of Winter begins with a prologue set during summer. The joy of summertime, warm and languid, is also what can make seasonal affective disorder so crippling. In fact, Rohmer’s protagonist Félicie has a profound sense of nostalgia, to the point where she fixates on one perfect, sun-kissed idyll that happened years ago. But Félicie does not have her head in the clouds, not entirely anyway, so part of the film’s charm is how she negotiates her love life with realism. No one raises their voices in this film, and all the characters – even the jilted ones – are more understanding about Félicie’s mercurial nature than she perhaps deserves. Like his other great works, A Tale of Winter might seem slight to a fault, and yet Rohmer uses low stakes and gentle drama to explore big ideas with genuine depth.
When we meet Félicie (Charlotte Véry), she is in the throes of a summer fling. Her and Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) have a passionate affair, seen mostly through montage, and their beachside holiday ends at a train station – arguably the most romantic setting in the movies – where she gives him her address. Then there is a smash cut to five years later, where Félicie lives with her mother (Christiane Desbois) and her daughter Elise (Ava Loraschi). Charles is nowhere to be found, and we learn over the course of the film that she gave him the wrong address (there is a touch of Linklater’s Before trilogy in this film). Elise is Charles’ daughter, something Félicie never lets her forget, since there is a prominent portrait of him in the child’s bedroom. Despite inroads in moving on from Charles, Félicie cannot quite let him go.
She has relationships and lovers, of course, and she keeps them at a distance because neither man is quite what she wants. She spends her time with Loïc (Hervé Furic), an intellectual who works at a library, but she has feelings for Maxence (Michel Voletti), a hairdresser who is also her boss. Charles is no secret from either man, and in dialogue scenes that are extremely French – there is no other way to put it – Félicie openly talks about her romantic past, while her current lovers feel no threat about it. The plot springs into action when Maxence announces he is leaving Paris for Nevers, a small town two hours away by train, and he wants to bring Félicie along. She agrees, taking Elise with her, except she realizes almost immediately this arrangement is untenable. Aside from the lack of regular child care, Félicie learns something that occurs to all young people who make a big change. Wherever you go, there you are, and in this case, a new city does not diminish her feelings for Charles.
All this could be the material for a lurid melodrama, one with big speeches and swells of manipulative music. That is not the approach Rohmer prefers, since he is a lowkey optimist. His realism comes through the scenes between Félicie and Loïc/Maxence: they understand her nature, which can be fickle, and love her anyway. More importantly, these are essentially kind people who look for understanding, rather than an opportunity to lash out. Maxence takes it well when Félicie returns to Paris, even noting that he will do nothing to stop her, because he – like Rohmer – realizes that asking Félicie for reciprocated romantic love is like drawing blood from a stone. All the drama is in the characters understanding an impasse, and so the pursuit of love is an intellectual exercise informed by feelings. The stakes are high, although they are not presented that way. Rohmer does not need histrionics to make us care.
The crucial turning point happens late in the film. After Félicie returns to Loïc, she joins him for a performance of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Rohmer shoots a long stretch of the film, with Félicie being quietly moved in the audience because she sees parallels between her plight and Hermione’s, a character in the play. This scene works as a plot justification for Félicie’s clarity about her own feelings, just not as cinema. The Shakespeare production is stodgy to a fault: poorly blocked, with wooden delivery, as if the theater director believes that Shakespeare performance should be respectful, not vivacious. It is hard to believe that Félicie, let alone anyone, could be moved by such a performance, and so we must accept it as a given. At least the following scene, one where Félicie and Loïc discuss romance and the meaning of an eternal soul, is livelier. It is here, when pushed by the remote and analytical Loïc, that Félicie gains levels of self-awareness and introspection previously unknown to her. It is moving precisely because of how the actors understand the text, something that cannot be said by the play within the film.
Because this is Rohmer, Félicie gets a reward for her epiphany. She sees Charles on a bus, and after immediately noting he still loves her, he ingratiates himself into her life in less than a day. Aside from the parallels between the Shakespeare play, which also features a deus ex machina, A Tale of Winter ends with Rohmer suggesting that romance is possible in modern life, as long as we are open to it. Maybe A Tale of Winter is farfetched, and yet sometimes the stars can align, with good people finding it in their hearts to embrace one another. Real life is all about what happens after a romantic high, so is a small coincidence really that unlikely? Rohmer thinks not, and that is the kind of thought that can keep us warm when we anxiously wait for springtime thaw.
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