Eric Rohmer’s Conte
d’hiver starts with some of the most carnal moments in all his work, of a
young couple plainly in love and lust, naked in and out of bed, seemingly at utter
physical and emotional ease with one another; we rapidly discover it’s a
vacation romance, with only the address Felicie gives Charles at the end to
ensure its continuity (he doesn’t have a fixed address, and she can’t even
accurately recall his surname). Five years later, we learn she mistakenly gave
him the wrong information, and they haven’t found each other since, even as his
picture dwells in her daughter’s room, so that the girl will always know who
her father was. Even as she juggles two other men (dumping one in order to impulsively
move out of Paris with the other, and then changing her mind and returning after
two days), Charles and the possibility of reuniting with him remain preeminent
in her mind – Rohmer’s gracefully involved dialogues explore whether this is
mere romantic folly, or a mark of faith that might even be rooted in the
immortality of the human soul. Felicie regards herself as relatively stupid,
especially compared to her bookish friend Loic, but through her commitment to
her own instincts and ideals ultimately evidences a greater capacity to shape her
world – he’s professedly religious and she isn’t, but she’s the one who prays
in the course of the film, and urges him to go to Mass on Sunday (Pascal’s
wager, much discussed in Ma nuit chez Maud, also comes back under the
microscope). Against this backdrop, the statistically improbable ending hardly
needs to be emphasized as a happy one, with an immediate sense of life moving
on. In the end, the narrative distance traveled perhaps isn’t much greater than
a carelessly calculated romantic comedy might traverse, but it’s a far
greater journey in all other respects.
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