Pauline à la plage

Young or old we can all make fools of ourselves, and the motivations are often obscure. Why should we choose one person over another ? Why should we make others jealous, and then be jealous ourselves ? Eric Rohmer is the supreme master of showing sexual hesitancy, emotional advances and then withdrawals and also how we avoid responsibility for our actions. And he is a master of the monologue and in ' Pauline at the Beach ' he shows emotional chaos caused by gossip, and he treats his subject matter so lightly that we know, or like to think we know, our cast of characters are going to bounce back and then move on. This film is not up there with ' The Aviator's Wife ', ' The Green Ray ' or ' My Girlfriend's Boyfriend ' but it is close. Arielle Dombasle and Pascal Greggory are a joy to watch, and I just wish he could have cast Dombasle in many other of his films. I prefer her in ' The Good Marriage ' which is also excellent in his ( perhaps ) best series ' Comedies and Proverbs. ' But very often I watch ' Pauline at the Beach ' for its sheer joy and illusions of being on vacation and behaving very badly indeed. Like Marivaux Rohmer does not flaunt seriousness at us but serious it is, and his roving camera shows gloriously every human mistake in the book but we rarely see emotional wounds, but for sure they are there. Set in Brittany this film casts its net wide on a cast ranging from the very young and those who are approaching middle age, and to use the word perhaps again, this is his best film at showing how we do not think we do, but how deep down we do know, we are fooling ourselves in the eternal game of love. Rohmer was I think politically conservative, but in this series this rarely shows, and I am grateful for it. His love of youth is perhaps obsessional but we all have memories of our youth, and like Proust he explores what makes those memories that will pursue us and remind us for the rest of our lives. He is to be taken seriously but always with a smile, and if we try to recall our own follies with honesty he is the director to turn to. I do return to him more than any other of the justly applauded writers and directors of great films.