Jeanne, a philosophy teacher, is on the move. Her fiancé having left her apartment for a few days, she prefers to make her nest elsewhere. This will be the home of Natacha, a young girl whom she meets by chance during a party: this one lives in the home of her father, cultural attaché coupled with a licensed seducer, who has the habit of only passing through his own home. “Every action has its consequences”, Jeanne’s motto during the many verbal jousts that fuse in this first part of the famous cycle of “Tales of the four seasons”, initiated by the old moralist master of the New Wave. And as, at Rohmer, we apply what we have just said, the result gives a game of the mind, which therefore turns little by little into erectile marivaudage.
homeless of love
Did you say deja vu? It’s true that the filmmaker has been mixing the same material since “La Collectionneuse”, except that he pushes the virtuosity of the frolic up a notch here, by confronting mirrored characters: a Lolita who intends to throw her father into the arms of the woman she has chosen for him, a collector who juggles from one mistress to another (and who sets his sights on conquests that are his daughter’s age), a heroine on the road to the routine that counts take advantage of his week of celibacy to take a side road. Rather than a hormonal effervescence specific to the spring of the title (and which the film captures very prosaically, painting here a profusion of greasy grass, or there a swarm of dazzling flowers), it is the quivering pleasure of an instability by nature ephemeral which structures the whole.
The love triangle constantly changes angles and sides, the characters fall in love and separate in a few words or almost. Even the ground is slipping under the feet of our playful flirts: pretty homeless love, Jeanne flies like a cuckoo clock from one home to another (six barracks visited in Paris and the suburbs in one big week), while apologizing, charming paradox, for hitting the encruster like this. To see before signing a lease or declaring your love to the chosen one of your heart.
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“Spring Tale”
Wednesday January 4 at 10:30 p.m. on Arte. Comedy drama by Eric Rohmer (1989). With Anne Teyssèdre, Hugues Quester. 1h43.
