New Wave Shakespeare: On Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Autumn
Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Autumn (1998) is the only film of his four seasons quartet with multiple protagonists. In A Tale of Springtime (1990), A Tale of Summer (1996), and A Tale of Winter (1992), other characters may have arcs and conflicts, but the point of view is always fixed on one protagonist — in Springtime philosophy teacher Jeanne, in Summer musician Gaspard, and in Winter hairstylist Félicie. A Tale of Autumn, meanwhile, though ostensibly about the wine-maker Magali, is actually a more diffuse story and spreads its narrative across three different characters, all of them women, two middle-aged, one young. The result is the most narratively complex of Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons and a film that feels like something Shakespeare would have written had he lived in modern France.
If A Tale of Springtime is about the blooming of friendship, A Tale of Summer about youthful passions, and A Tale of Winter about the gestation and hibernation of a powerful love, A Tale of Autumn is about the symbolism of the harvest and about aging and maturity. Our three protagonists, Magali (Béatrice Romand) the wine-maker, Isabelle (Marie Rivière) her married friend, and Rosine (Alexia Portal) her son’s sprightly and calculating girlfriend, all come face to face with the reality of time, symbolized most directly by the grapes they are harvesting. This is the traditional meaning of autumn — youthful summer is over and soon the crops will have to be harvested, and before you know it winter will be here. In our current climate-changing world, where Octobers are growing hotter, perhaps autumn no longer feels like this, but Rohmer, like Shakespeare, is tapping into deeper significations, and thus his fourth and final seasonal tale retains its relevance as a beautiful and by the end very bittersweet commentary on the passing of time, with the narrative form of one of Shakespeare’s comedies.
The basic storyline of A Tale of Autumn centers on Magali, a widowed winemaker in her mid-forties who begins to feel the pangs of loneliness — but though she is the ostensible protagonist, it is actually other characters who provide the film with its narrative drive, primarily out of concern for Magali. Magali, thus, is like a Queen in a Shakespeare play — talked about frequently by other characters and around whom the narrative’s primary conflict circles but who for large sections of the story remains an off-screen presence.
Instead, it is Isabelle, Magali’s friend, who appears in most of the film’s scenes. Unlike Magali, Isabelle is happily married and about to celebrate the wedding of her daughter — but behind the facade of this perfect life, we detect a subtle ennui, the ennui of middle-age and a life of comfort. Because Magali constantly pushes back against other people’s attempts to solve her loneliness, Isabelle’s subtle longing becomes one of the film’s primary driving forces, and she turns her search for a man for Magali into her own vicarious romance: in a key scene in the film, Isabelle, in the middle of the night and dressed in a short negligee that suffuses the moment with sexual suggestion, writes out a personal ad that is as much for herself as it is for Magali: “Forty-five-year-old widow, two grown-up children, fun-loving, lively, sociable, but living alone in the countryside is looking for a man who appreciates moral and physical beauty.” This of course is what most of Rohmer’s women are looking for, and it’s touching to see it so succinctly summed up like this, here in his most directly symbolic of films.
The film’s third protagonist, meanwhile, is Rosine, the vibrant heart of the movie, flitting impishly from scene to scene. She is the girlfriend of Magali’s son Leo (Stéphane Darmon), but she is also a kind of surrogate daughter for Magali herself (they have the same curly hair), and both Rosine and Magali project themselves into each other: Rosine is the image of youth that Magali secretly longs for, while Magali is the mature older woman Rosine hopes to one day be. Rosine, like Isabelle, tries to set Magali up with a new man — in this case, Rosine’s philosophy professor and former lover Étienne (Didier Sandre). Rosine is outwardly motivated by Magali’s well being, but part of the brilliant subtlety of the script and of Portal’s performance is how viewers can see through her charming exterior to the vulnerable center — Rosine might be as young and sprightly as Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but she is no fairy spirit and must age like everyone else. Thus, part of her insistence on pushing Étienne and Magali together is a psychological reassurance that Étienne didn’t simply love her for her youth and that when presented with a maturer version of her, he can still feel the same passion.
Rohmer has often depicted relationships between older men and younger women, such as in A Tale of Springtime. Often this is just a given, an aspect of French culture that for American audiences is an amusing stereotype. But with A Tale of Autumn, Rohmer turns his sophisticated social and cultural analysis on the moral dilemma of this kind of relationship. Rosine, sadly, learns a harsh lesson about men and about life: Étienne ultimately has no interest in Magali, and during the wedding that makes up the final third of the film, he turns his flirtatious charm on another former student of his, a girl in a red dress who Rohmer expertly positions in the background of various shots, the red of the dress just striking enough to catch our attention (and soon Étienne’s too). As Magali succinctly puts it to Rosine, “men who like young girls do so all their life. As they get older, they pick even younger ones.” In her final scene, driving with Étienne down a dark road, Rosine’s expression shifts as she finally seems to understand this bitter truth.
Isabelle and Magali have more conventional endings for a romantic comedy: after all the misunderstandings and emotional tensions are resolved, the man whom Isabelle meets, Gérald (Alain Libolt), does eventually choose Magali, and Isabelle returns to her husband and dances with him in the film’s final scene. The wedding band, meanwhile, sings about autumn as the credits roll: “Harvest time for the grapes/The world has turned again.”
With these three storylines, Rohmer is telling perhaps his most moral tale yet, about three sides of a woman’s life: Rosine’s youthful disillusionment, Isabelle’s middle-aged ennui and yearning, and, with Magali, the possibility of a future, regardless of age. The narrative is a little reminiscent of Twelfth Night, with Isabelle as a variation of Viola, disguising herself to bring Orsino and Olivia together, but in doing so falling in love with Orsino herself, just as Isabelle falls for Gérald.
Like A Tale of Autumn, Twelfth Night also contains a celebration of wine and good cheer, though because it is set in winter, near Christmas, it’s perhaps not the most obvious seasonal comparison. Instead, As You Like It, Shakespeare’s comedy set in the Forest of Arden, feels more appropriate as a reference point. The play is not explicitly set in autumn, but it is full of orchards and forests and pastoral imagery and thus feels imbued with the spirit of autumn. There is also the same thematic contrast between the city and the country present in A Tale of Autumn, as well as a matchmaking subplot, with Rosalind, like Isabelle, disguising herself and attempting to sort the various couples into their ideal pairings.
As You Like It ends with a monologue from Rosalind that serves as the play’s epilogue, and it feels like in many ways it could also be an epilogue for Rohmer’s Autumn. “If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ‘tis true that a good play needs no epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues.” Beyond the reference to wine, though, there is a deeper connection between Rohmer’s vision and Rosalind’s final speech. “My way is to conjure you,” Rosalind continues, “and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women- as I perceive by your simp’ring none of you hates them- that between you and the women the play may please.” It is a jocular, somewhat frivolous exhortation in which Rosalind simply encourages both men and women to enjoy the play. But hidden beneath the simplicity is some complex gender play: Rosalind is a woman who has pretended to be a man and thus can speak to both men and women. Rohmer, similarly, is a filmmaker who has an androgynous spirit about his work — his early movies centered on male protagonists, but his later work, in particular the Seasons films, often centers on women. Just as Rosalind, a woman, pretends to be a man to teach Orlando the meaning of the classical ideal of love, so Rohmner, a man, creates with A Tale of Autumn a story about three women to teach people about the moral complexities of love in the modern age.
