Two of the most important openings tomorrow are the work of veteran directors, only one of whom is alive to witness the event. The first is Clint Eastwood’s “Jersey Boys,” which I’ll revisit soon; the second is “A Summer’s Tale,” the late Eric Rohmer’s lyrical romance, from 1996, which is only now getting its long-overdue theatrical release. (My capsule review is in the magazine this week.) Rohmer made the film in the summer of 1995, at the age of seventy-five. (He died in 2010.) This film is one of the many great foreign films from the nineties that, owing to a confluence of forces—including the closing of art-house theatres, competition from home video, and increasing print-advertising costs—never came out here. (The long list also includes such films as another, perhaps even greater, film of Rohmer’s, “The Tree, the Mayor, and the Médiathèque,” as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague,” Philippe Garrel’s terrifyingly terminal “Night Wind,” co-starring Catherine Deneuve, and Noémie Lvovsky’s scourging romantic drama “Forget Me.”)
Coincidence plays a large role in Rohmer’s work, in particular in “A Summer’s Tale,” the story of a young man—a mathematician who spends much of his time writing and performing music—who, while awaiting his girlfriend in Dinard, a resort town in Brittany, gets involved with two other young women whom he meets there. And, when considering the coincidental release of this film alongside “Jersey Boys,” some peculiar coincidences turned up.
Both of these movies are about young people who dream of a career in the music business while working in other fields. Both movies were made by directors who got relatively late starts as directors—Rohmer directed his first feature, “The Sign of Leo,” in 1959, at the age of thirty-nine, and Eastwood made his first, “Play Misty for Me,” in 1970, at forty. Both of those first features are centered on music. “The Sign of Leo” is about a violinist and composer who suddenly runs out of money and becomes homeless; “Play Misty for Me” is about a jazz d.j. who is stalked by a listener. Both directors have lifelong fascinations with music. Eastwood is a skilled jazz pianist who has also composed music for some of his films, and has made one of the best jazz movies ever, “Bird.” Rohmer also played piano and, while he was making “A Summer’s Tale,” he was writing a remarkable book about music, “From Mozart to Beethoven” (released in 1996), in which he expressed ideas about artistic classicism that apply to his approach to movies as well.
Eastwood is, and Rohmer was, politically centrist-to-conservative. In the fifties, Rohmer exhibited Royalist leanings, and when he edited Cahiers du Cinéma, in the early sixties, he kept a batch of overtly right-wing writers in its fold. “The Tree, the Mayor, and the Médiathèque” is openly skeptical of well-intended Socialist projects, and “The Lady and the Duke” is a skeptical look at the French Revolution. I’ve also seen a TV interview with him— from the mid-nineties, I think—in which he explains that, though he may not consider himself to be on the right, he’s also “not a leftist.”
Both directors have a fascination with the past—Eastwood’s cinematic reconstructions of the days of his youth, whether in “Changeling” or “Bird,” “White Hunter Black Heart” or “J. Edgar,” and, now, “Jersey Boys,” have a particular nuance and verve. And Rohmer …
Well, that’s where we get back to “A Summer’s Tale.” Rohmer recreated only rarely history in his features: only “Triple Agent,” a nineteen-thirties political drama, recreates a time within his memory. “A Summer’s Tale” is, in effect, a veiled period piece, a retrospective view of Rohmer’s own youth, involving a state of mind and a personal situation that corresponds closely to those that he experienced half a century earlier.
The protagonist of “A Summer’s Tale,” Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), explains to Margot (Amanda Langlet), a graduate student he meets on the beach, that he plans to become a teacher because, unlike a career in engineering, it would let him keep his time free to satisfy his musical ambitions. This is what Rohmer himself did: in the forties, he fulfilled the academic requirements to become a high-school teacher of French, and took a teaching job in the early nineteen-fifties in order to pursue a career as a film critic, editor, and director.
Gaspard is a walking cipher, a man without qualities, passing through life with a strange neutrality, holding himself in abeyance in anticipation of a vaguely glorious future. He starts the film with some of the longest silences in Rohmer’s dialectical œuvre, and his name isn’t even heard until midway through the movie. He relates to Margot the prediction of a graphologist, that he’d “come into his own” around the age of thirty. (In fact, it wasn’t until around the age of thirty that Rohmer—whose 1946 novel, “Élisabeth,” was a flop—began to come into his own, writing film criticism, running a film club, publishing a small magazine in which he published articles by his younger friends Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, and making movies independently.)
“A Summer’s Tale” features a scene—brief, but underlined by a shock cut away from it—in which Gaspard speaks of his musical ambitions with a young businessman, of his plans to make music the center of his life without making a living from it, without participating in the industry. It’s a clear yet subtle tribute to his life as an independent filmmaker, as an accidental success.
The movie ends (I’ll avoid spoilers) with a deft and decisive tribute to the moral virtue and romantic centrality of artistic ambition. And it features a lightning-sharp phrase—spoken, tellingly, not by Gaspard himself but by the perspicacious, intellectual Margot—that encapsulates, in two words, Rohmer’s character, his career, and his lifelong array of cinematic protagonists. At a moment when Gaspard expresses his doubts of his romantic prospects, she calls attention to his “negative confidence.” Of course, she means something like pessimism, his expectation of the worst—but what emerges is the ironic truth, the confidence that from self-denial, from refusal, from negation, from evasion, from self-effacement, from withdrawal, and from an active self-marginalization, a positive image will ultimately emerge.
Rohmer’s confidence in chance, in coincidence, is also a confidence in providence, in divine grace—albeit one that’s aided by a pure, if prickly and obstinate, will, even a negative one. In its singular vision of ambition and its intimate price, “A Summer’s Tale” is strangely similar to “Jersey Boys.”