In outline,
Jacques Rozier’s Du cote d’Orouet
might sound very much like a Rohmer movie – three young women on summer vacation
on the French coast, passing time doing nothing in particular (they’re in a
rather desolate, under-populated spot), with a couple of guys eventually
blended into the mix. But these aren’t Rohmer-type women – no one ever makes a
literary reference (or barely reads a book) or engages in verbal philosophizing
or self-examination. They’re there to have fun, captured delightfully in
sequences where they crack themselves up by finding goofy ways to say “Orouet”
or engage in other private jokes, or stuff their faces with eclairs. But the
equation of vacation time at the beach/coast with ensuing fun doesn’t take care
of itself, and waves of melancholy or emptiness might flow as easily as
spiritual refreshment. At two and a half hours, the movie takes its time,
sometimes just wryly observing, pretending to be a more straightforward project
than it is, leaving much unsaid and unshown (there’s very little overt
sexuality in the film, for one thing). But it becomes gradually clear that Rozier
is musing on the annual vacation as an institution, and by extension on the
nature of work and our relationship to it – by implication, the movie is more
about the toll of the eleven months spent at work than about the month spent
away from it. It implicitly asks: when one’s economic viability depends on
subjugation to mind-numbing repetition and triviality, how can we expect to
overcome that conditioning by following preconceived, mechanized notions of
having a break from it? It’s only at the end though that we can sense this
percolating in the mind of one of the women, and sense the existential
crisis that could flow from that, if the machine of her life were to yield to
it.
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