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