This 1986 film from the late new wave veteran Eric Rohmer is the penultimate chapter of his six-part series Comedies and Proverbs, and arguably the best. Written in collaboration with its lead Marie Rivière, it’s a remarkably slender, even flimsy-seeming story about a young woman, Delphine, who finds herself unsure how to spend her summer holiday and ends up drifting from friend to friend, resort to resort, increasingly disconsolate and at a loose end. Still, she clings to her faith in destiny, which eventually seems to reveal its design in the form of an obscure Jules Verne novel chatted about by a group of senior citizens on the Biarritz beachfront.
Shot on 16mm with a skeleton crew, the film features a number of Rohmer regulars, including Béatrice Romand and Rosette as Delphine’s pugnacious and coquettish friends, respectively, together with assorted non-professionals. They bring the tang of uncooked reality to a story that at times resembles a documentary on the French cult of the summer holiday. Some moments suggest an inconsequential comedy about people talking nonsense; the wonderful scene in which Delphine holds forth to mystified friends about her vegetarianism (“Lettuce is more like a friend”) has an almost Seinfeldian ring, as she babbles away with impassioned incoherence.
But The Green Ray – the centrepiece of the BFI’s current Rohmer retrospective – is also a serious film, and a sad one, a perspicaciously empathetic study of solitude, depression and anxiety. Delphine has recently split up with a never-seen boyfriend, a fact subtly kept as background information, although it informs everything we see. But the payoff, at once simple and utterly miraculous, will send you out of the cinema floating, and a little puzzled about how Rohmer pulls off this modest but immensely potent emotional sleight of hand.
