Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 2: Fri Jan 2

The Green Ray (Rohmer, 1986): BFI Southbank, 2.30, 6.10 & 8.30pm


The Green Ray, the centrepiece of the BFI Southbank Eric Rohmer season, starts an extended run today and runs till 18 January. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Eric Rohmer's fifth installment in his "Comedies and Proverbs" cycle is as conversationally obsessed as ever (which is quite all right with me), though as always in Rohmer's ironic universe, talk is less the moral equivalent of action than the rationalizing substitute for it. A jilted secretary pining away the summer in Paris decides to take a vacation on her own; unfortunately, the more she travels the lonelier she becomes as her rationalizing search for the ideal food, the ideal romance, the ideal traveling companion drives her more and more toward narcissistic nullity. I suspect Rohmer sees in his heroine an ironic reflection of his own aesthetic temper—the lighter and airier she gets, the more she threatens to evanesce completely—and at times this 1986 film comes perilously close to duplicating the girl's predicament. Fortunately, there's more to Rohmer's subtle strategy than idle distillations, and the marvelous epiphany at the end provides whatever justification is needed for the precarious formal balancing: it's a moment of emotional complexity and revelation based, appropriately enough, on a trivial optical illusion. With Marie Riviere, Lisa Heredia, Eric Hamm, and an appealingly contentious Beatrice Romand.
Pat Graham

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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