Margot (Amanda Langlet) and Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) contemplate love and friendship in Éric Rohmer’s A SUMMER’S TALE
A SUMMER’S TALE (CONTE D’ÉTÉ) (Éric Rohmer, 1996)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, June 20
www.bigworldpictures.org
French New Wave auteur Éric Rohmer’s 1996 A Summer’s Tale, the third of his seasonal 1990s stories following A Tale of Winter and A Tale of Springtime and preceding the finale, A Tale of Autumn, is a bittersweet romance about the follies of young love. In a seaside Breton resort town in the 1970s, musician and mathematician Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) awaits the arrival of his girlfriend, Lena (Aurélia Nolin), who has not been answering his phone calls or returning his letters. He strikes up a perhaps platonic relationship with waitress-ethnologist Margot (Amanda Langlet), whose boyfriend is off in the Peace Corps. When Gaspard makes a move on Margot, she instead encourages him to go out with the free-spirited Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon). Soon Gaspard finds himself lost among three beautiful women, forced to make choices that he’s clearly not ready for. Strikingly photographed by Rohmer favorite Diane Baratier in a subdued, ’70s-style palette, A Summer’s Tale is a charmingly insightful and frustrating exploration of young love, desire, and commitment in which a group of attractive twentysomethings are caught between just wanting to have some fun and plotting out their future. It’s ironic that Gaspard is a mathematician, as he seems to have trouble as soon as he gets to the number three. Meanwhile, it’s appropriate that the ever-wise and knowing Margot (played with a captivating and alluring ease by Pauline at the Beach star Langlet) is an ethnologist, as she carefully studies Gaspard and others as she makes her way through life. Rohmer made A Summer’s Tale when he was seventy-five; the former editor of Cahiers du cinéma would go on to direct four more films before his death in 2010 at the age of eighty-nine. After eighteen years, A Summer’s Tale, which premiered at Cannes in 1996, is finally getting its U.S. theatrical release, opening June 20 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza in a new HD restoration, a lovely way to kick off the summer movie season.