Four Adventures

The Green Ray had been too easy to film, too easy to edit.  And then people liked it, and I thought they wouldn't.  That's why I set out immediately afterward to make Reinette and Mirabelle.  I wanted to see if I was on the right track with the principles of lightness and improvisation, if they could function with another kind of experience. 
--Éric Rohmer

I missed last week's film in SAM's Éric Rohmer series, as I've already complained, because of a power outage at my house.  My understanding was that this week I'd be seeing The Green Ray (1986) (released as Summer in America), the fifth in Rohmer's series entitled "Comedies and Proverbs."

Unfortunately, they showed The Green Ray last week.  I understand that it's an interesting film, partly because Rohmer allowed his cast to largely improvise their lines as they went along.  He shot the film chronologically in 16 mm, so that the cast would be affected as little as possible by the presence of the camera.  According to Wikipedia, the film's major expense was a trip to the Canary Islands to film the sun's green flash at sunset.

This week's film, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987), was apparently filmed using similar experiments with improvisation.  Mirabelle, a young woman from Paris, meets Reinette, a self-taught artist who lives on a farm, when Mirabelle's bike has a flat tire as she cruises along a country road near Reinette's house.  Reinette patches Mirabelle's tire, and the two talk.  Mirabelle remarks on the silence of the country, compared with city life.  Reinette tells her that nature has many sounds when you listen for them, but there's a magic moment at dawn, just one minute, when the sounds of the night stop and the sounds of the day have not yet begun.

Mirabelle is persuaded to stay overnight, to witness that "blue" moment, and then another night.  She persuades Reinette to come live with her in Paris when she begins art school.

Thus ends the first of the four titled "adventures." 

The other three take place in Paris, while the girls are roommates.  Reinette is revealed as a highly moral young woman, one who always leaves a franc for every beggar, and who returns the next day to pay for a cup of coffee she had failed to pay for the day before.  Mirabelle feels that Reinette is a gullible sucker, as do the beggars and the coffee vendor as well.  Mirabelle also tries to do the right thing, but she is more attuned to life in the city.  She is more cynical about the alleged hardships of others. 

Each "adventure" is different, and each is both funny and somewhat moving.  Each shows the contrast between the country hick, who is less gullible than she seems on the surface, and the city slicker, who is kinder than she wants to appear.  But which actions are neighborly and which are simply foolish differ, depending on whether the context is life in the city or the country.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the movie -- which I no doubt would have noted in The Green Ray as well -- is the naturalness of unscripted dialogue.  Watching the two women work at patching the tire was like watching a couple of kids doing the same job next door.  At times, they were merely mumbling as they bent over their work -- without the subtitles, I doubt I could have understood what they were saying even if I spoke French.  Their conversations, like the conversations of most of us, didn't always proceed directly from A to B to C.  They went about in circles, repeating themselves. 

We might not want to watch all movies filmed this way.  There's room for the witty, almost artificially articulate conversations between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.  But Four Adventures reminds us that real people rarely speak that way.  They stutter and mumble and grope for words.

Marabelle and Reinetta do grope for words.  But, in doing so, they seem real and honest and very human.

Beautifully filmed, both in the country and in Paris.