oscar@utcsrgv.UUCP (Oscar M. Nierstrasz) (08/27/83)
Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer; France; 1983) ***
Ok, if you want to be really crude about it, it's sort of a cross
between "My Dinner With Andre" and a Feydeau farce. The subject
is, "Qu'est-ce que c'est, cette chose qui s'appelle 'l'amour'?",
and, (holy cow!), does anyone really mean what they say they
think about it?
Marion (or Marianne, I can't remember) is an extremely attractive
(her bum, anyway) young woman (an archetypal "dumb blond") who
has been married (sorry about all the parenthetical comments) and
divorced. She takes her teenaged cousin, Pauline, to the beach
with her, where we meet Pierre, a windsurfing hunk who is madly
in love with Marion, and has been for several years. For some
reason the poor sucker has been unable to convince Marion that,
by gosh, she should reciprocate. Every time that he thinks he's
getting close, some other guy comes along and gets the girl --
exactly this happens within three minutes of Marion's arrival at
the beach.
Henri is an older fellow whose ideas on love are far more, shall
we say, "narcissistic", than those held by Marion or Pierre. He
can't stand to be tied down to people, places, or things. To
Pierre's astonishment and utter dismay, Henri sweeps Marion off
her feet. Rohmer establishes in an early scene what everyone's
views on "l'amour" are, or rather, what they say they are. A
good chunk of this film is in the form of such conversations, but
what conversations! The rest, the action, that is, is a series
of mishappenings, misadventures and misunderstandings that serve
to underline the inconsistencies in the characters' supposed be-
liefs.
I won't say anything about Pauline, except that she turns out to
be the most sensible one of the lot.
Although there is a lot to watch out for in the film, and Rohmer
makes some very incisive and insightful comments on human
behaviour, "Pauline at the Beach" still succeeds at being fairly
"light" entertainment: you can leave your brain at home if you
want to. (The people next to me at the theatre evidently had
left theirs and lost them years ago. They must have looked at
the movie ad, not known who Eric Rohmer was, and figured it was a
French "beach party" movie. They were pretty bored: they missed
the humour that was there and found it where there wasn't any.)
A word about the cinematography: for the most part Rohmer seems
to be of the "let's put the camera down here and keep it running
for a while" school of filmaking. People move in and out of the
frame with very little cutting. In a film like this where the
viewer obtains the maximum impact if he or she has the illusion
of impartiality and objectivity, this works very well. This is
not to say that Rohmer doesn't know how to make a good-looking
movie: his scenes are beautifully composed and they really
"click". When he does move the camera or cut shorter scenes to-
gether, they are all the more effective because we don't expect
it.
It's good. See it soon.
Oscar Nierstrasz @ utzoo!utcsrgv