A Tale of Springtime

A TALE OF SPRINGTIME   ***

Éric Rohmer

1990

IDEA:  Adrift in life, philosophy professor Jeanne becomes involved in a romantic scheme orchestrated by a young piano student named Natacha.

BLURB:  Many of Éric Rohmer’s films have a paradoxical quality of seeming both banal and deeply wise, desultory and deliberate. He manages the considerable feat of tempering insufferable bourgeois solipsism with an honest, empathic sense for how his materially privileged characters, with so much time on their hands, get caught up in self-sabotaging habits of overthinking and convoluted games of courtship. A Tale of Springtime is no different. Set during a time of seasonal renewal, the film focuses on characters who are ironically stuck, looking for something that can melt away their personal blockages. Jeanne resides in two apartments before ending up in a third, and that’s before she’s welcome to a house in the country, and yet nowhere is she able to settle. In a fine example of the kind of random, fortuitous encounters Rohmer is so crafty at developing, Jeanne ends up fitting into the romantic stratagem of Natacha, who’s looking to displace her father’s young paramour with someone more to her liking. A Tale of Springtime spends a whole lot of time observing Jeanne and Natacha, characters imbued with rich psychological detail by actresses Anne Teyssèdre and Florence Darel, and of course by Rohmer’s signature talky dialogue. Around their ambling conversations, the director crafts an unfussy but exacting mise-en-scène of pastel colors and rustic floral patterns, soothing surfaces that can also feel teasing in their gentility. Slow-going in the beginning, A Tale of Springtime, like the titular season, imperceptibly comes alive as you watch it, its characters’ frustrations blooming propitious petals.