Eric Rohmer’s 1996 film A Tale of Summer begins much the same way that the director’s 1983 holiday film Pauline at the Beach did. We see Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) arriving in Dinard, a town on the Brittany coast, and heading to his lodgings. Rohmer echoes a shot from Pauline of the visitor walking up to the locked iron gate of his temporary residence and letting himself in. At first, the young man does not speak; he walks around town, heads to the beach, and always has his mouth full of some snack or meal. In an amusingly subtle use of a New Wave jump cut, Rohmer shows Gaspard in a café raising his hand to order, only for the scene to jump forward to him drinking his beer and eating a sandwich.
These moments gently convey the feeling of vacation, having nothing planned other than idly drifting and obeying the biological need to feed. Gaspard’s listlessness isn’t a character trait; it’s simply a reflection of how humans behave when they can relax. His relationship to his surroundings is the appropriately impersonal bent of a tourist with nothing to mark the passage of time other than the revolutions of the sun and moon. In fact, Gaspard spends so much time casually dining that the first romantic connection he makes in town is a fitting one: a server. Margot (Amanda Langlet) jars him out of his silent suaveness by forcing him to talk, and her transparent flirtations are followed up when she meets him at the beach in a bikini.
Despite his age, Rohmer was always a master at writing believable conversations between intelligent youth. Gaspard and Margot quickly reveal their chemistry via their shared love of music. Gaspard has a hipster’s revulsion of modern music and instead gravitates toward sea shanties, something that Margot is researching for an ethnology project. Thus Gaspard’s quirky affectations find a willing audience, and even as he mopes about his girlfriend not coming out to meet him, he clearly grows closer to this new friend that reciprocates his hobbies. Later, however, Margot introduces Gaspard to an acquaintance, Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), whose more direct desire for the boy manifests in actually making music with him.
Gaspard’s loose attachment to the girls reflects his personality, which is filled with the self-conscious cool of someone who does not even have problems to ignore. When he first starts to hang out with Margot, he maintains his unwillingness to work while on break and says that he doesn’t want to plan his life around money. Margot, who is also on vacation but works to earn something, coolly replies that if she did she did that she would find a better class of work than waiting tables. His remove comes off as flippant, and his strident desire to be a paid musician without working through the music industry reveals his immaturity.
Soon, the boy juggles the affections of two girls, irritating one when he spends his time with the other. This problem compounds itself when Gaspard’s girlfriend Léna (Aurelia Nolin) belatedly shows up and he falls back in with her without a hint of annoyance at her absence. Views of Gaspard with each girl often start in a long shot, with the ambient sound of nearby tourists washing over his meetings, but the camera gradually moves closer to the actors, sealing them off from the world around them. Far from a romantic depiction of mutual longing, however, this aesthetic tic visualizes Gaspard’s tunnel vision and his inability to think of the other women in his life when he’s with any one person.
In Rohmer’s typically placid comic fashion, Gaspard’s fast and loose affections for each woman places him into a trap of his own making. The director’s style of romantic comedy resembles screwball at quarter-speed, with dexterous but modestly paced conversation belying how thoroughly the protagonists, usually males, screw themselves in their manipulative flirtations. Gaspard fits within a long line of Rohmerian leads, a wannabe intellectual who is quickly deduced by the women he shuffles between; ditching Solène to get back with Léna, only for the latter to snap back at his attempts to goad her into doing only the things he wants to do. Léna’s rant about the men in her life who all treat her as arm candy to go along with their interests with no regard to her own could stand in for a dozen or more times in the director’s catalogue that a man has deserved this particular tongue-lashing. The tranquil coda suggests an end to the comedy of errors less because Gaspard has finally committed than his need to return home settles certain questions for him. Rarely has the end of summer break seemed more of a relief.
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