Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime may
bring to mind the maxim driving his earlier Full Moon In Paris –“He who has two women loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind.” Jeanne,
a young philosophy teacher, can’t stay in her own place because she lent it to
a cousin, and doesn’t want to sleep at her messy boyfriend’s place while he’s
away, so she accepts a sleepover invitation from Natasha, a music student she
meets at a party, and then remains for a week, getting drawn into the
complications between Natasha and her father and his younger girlfriend Eve,
whom Natasha detests, suspecting her in particular of stealing a family
heirloom necklace. Despite the promise of the title, the film is among the more
withholding of Rohmer’s late works, partly reflecting the relative severity of
its protagonist – when philosophy is discussed here, it’s as much for display
as anything else, with Eve flaunting how her knowledge is greater than Natasha’s.
The film develops a sense of escalating pressure – the larger the canvas of
possibility that Natasha presents for Jeanne (including the notion that Jeanne
might replace Eve as her father’s partner), the more restricting it starts to
seem; release only arrives through a freak event that absolves everyone of
guilt, emphasizing the prominence of chance and caprice in our lives, and the traps
inherent in human intellect and perception. Still, when in the end the film
realizes its title by having Jeanne return to familiar territory, replacing a
vase of withered old flowers with some bright new ones, it’s a less
satisfactory arrival point than Rohmer customarily provides, with the nature of
Jeanne’s inner renewal rather hard to glean (other than that, in some general
sense, she’s found a way to modestly evade the inner confinement that arises from
a life hemmed in by logistics and infrastructure).
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