Summer (Le Rayon Vert) is the fifth of French director Eric Rohmer's Comedies et Proverbes movie cycle. Left out of everyone's Summer vacation plans, unhappy Parisian student Marie Riviere (Rohmer's star in all of the Comedies et Proverbes) accepts an invitation to stay at her friend's empty apartment in Biarritz. Swedish tourist Carita tries to snap Riviere out of her bad mood, but the two ladies are polar opposites in terms of relating to the opposite sex. Carita will take it any way she can,
while Riviere holds out for true romance. A mystical assignation tied in with the old Jules Verne novel Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) brings Riviere in contact with the man of her dreams (Vincent Gauthier). An international award winner, Summer was surprisingly overlooked in France, where director Rohmer was (in the 1980s at least) somewhat taken for granted.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
If Eric Rohmer were basing a film on your diary, he would only use the entries where you observe that nothing much happened. He is interested in the times between the big moments, the times when boredom and disenchantment set in.
Delphine is the sort of person who would rather be unhappy than compromise her own expectations of life; this is a woman who's idea of beach reading is Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.
Eric Rohmer's comedy, one of his best, follows a lonely Parisian secretary as her quest for a transcendent July vacation becomes stalled in misadventure and self-doubt.
[Rohmer's] persistence gets just underneath Delphine's surface, finding her painful, anxious self-doubt; we keep rooting for her to rise above it, rather than succumbing.
Stay awake through this 90-minute exercise in conceitedness (which presumably tells us how the modern world makes us all sad and pathetic) and you'll be rewarded with... well, with nothing. Congrats, more meaningless cinema under your belt.
Also known as The Green Ray; by any name, this rose would smell as sweet. An all-time-great film that feels like a romance even though, I suppose, it isn't.
French New Wave director Eric Rohmer has always had a particular talent for transforming even the most inconsequential stories into fascinating portraits of the difficulties of choice and the moral complexity of making decisions.
Summer: Every time I watch a Rohmer, I fall in love.
Lancelot & L'Argent: Bresson... Totally impressive.
Wild Strawberries: I enjoyed it, but don't really understand all the fuss about its greatness. Well it is great, but to me other Bergman works were better (e.g. Persona).
No quotes approved yet for Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray) (Summer). Logged in users can submit quotes.
Submit a Quote from 'Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray) (Summer)'
A quote can be a single line from one character or a memorable dialog between several characters. Please make your quotes accurate. Quotes will be submitted for approval by the RT staff.
Example:
Luke: Alright. I'll give it a try. Yoda: No. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.
Top Critic
