The second film in Eric Rohmer's Four Season series, Conte d'hiver is the story of a woman (Charlotte Very) who meets a man she falls in love with (Frederic van den Driessche) and has a daughter by (unknown to him) after they have said goodbye and she has inadvertently given him the wrong address, making it impossible for him to find her again. Five years later we find her in a strange menage a trois, attracted to, but not in love with, two different men each of whom she leaves for the other. Offering her different things, she is unable to choose between them, aware that she is still in love with the father of her child. Like its predecessor in the series, Conte de printemps, and so many other Rohmer films, this is a film replete with reflections on love and life. It is also a film about integrity, and the costs to oneself and others of emotional faithfulness to a lost love; indeed this is what gives the film its focus, as the purity of her lost love stands in counterpoint to the banal and seemingly meaningless choices that are available to her in her daily life. Charlotte Very's performance makes us care what happens to her, and the poignancy of her dilemma is brought home towards the end of the film by 'a play within a play' - a scene from a sumptuously produced version of Shakespeare's A Tale In Winter which should be required viewing for anyone who believes that Shakespeare and his contemporaries have nothing to say to a modern audience. This is a beautiful and moving film, which I would commend to anyone interested in the complexity of human emotions and responses.
