Spirituality Amidst the Mundane: On Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter
There is no specific order to Éric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons. You could follow the natural course of the seasons, as I’ve done while writing these pieces, spring to summer to autumn and finally to winter. Or you could follow the order the films were made: A Tale of Springtime (1990), A Tale of Winter (1992), A Tale of Summer (1996), and A Tale of Autumn (1998). The effect will be somewhat different, but the truth is the order is less important than the sense of the whole — each film is one side of a larger structure that exists beyond the linear experience of time, and the best way to understand the four part series is to watch them multiple times and think about them in relation to each other. Vladimir Nabokov makes a similar point in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature when he says that the best readers are rereaders:
When we read a book for the first time, the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting.
Rohmer’s Four Seasons films are like one large painting whose structure and genius can only really be appreciated upon rewatching them in a different order. Only then do the correspondences and intricacies reveal themselves.
One can take this idea even further, meanwhile, and see all of Rohmer’s work as one vast painting — and when looked at through this lens, A Tale of Winter, the most emotionally powerful of the Four Seasons films, can be seen not only as an inverse of A Summer’s Tale but also as a complement to what are often regarded as Rohmer’s masterpieces: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and The Green Ray (1986), both of which likewise deal with themes of faith, grace, and cathartic renewal.
The setup of A Tale of Winter (also sometimes translated as A Winter’s Tale, which feels appropriate here because of the Shakespeare reference) is, as noted above, an inverted variation of A Tale of Summer: our protagonist Félicie (Charlotte Véry), a hairdresser, finds herself deciding between two different men while pining for a third, absent lover, just as curly-haired Gaspard in Summer finds himself torn between Margot and Solène while waiting for Léna. But while in A Tale of Summer this complex web is played for light comedy and Gaspard is an amusing figure, in A Tale of Winter the same setup is shaded into something much more tragic: a miscommunication meant that Félicie’s lover Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) never knew her address, and as a result after a blissful young lovers’ romance, they lost touch. Five years later, we find Félicie dating two unsatisfactory men — her boss Maxence (Michel Voletti) and a librarian Loïc (Hervé Furic), both of whom are kind but neither of whom can live up to her memory of Charles.
As a protagonist, Félicie is simple and almost saintly, with her perpetually innocent expression, her heartwarming love of her daughter, and her steadfast commitment to the memory of Charles. Whether Rohmer intended it or not, her name is almost identical to Félicité, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s 1877 story “A Simple Heart” (“Un coeur simple,” sometimes translated as “A Simple Soul”). Like Rohmer’s film, Flaubert’s story is a deeply Catholic one, and both protagonists share a direct and powerful faith, which gives them the steadfastness to survive their trials.
Flaubert’s story, however, is much bleaker and more melancholy and covers Félicité’s full life. Rohmer, by contrast, is interested not in a full saintly life but in spirituality as a component of ordinary experience. Félicie “trials” are not caused by anything as dramatic as poverty but instead by a simple, almost mundane error — writing the wrong address on a piece of paper. As with many Rohmer protagonists, her subsequent suffering is largely internal and emotional and conveyed here through the shots of her daily routine, sitting on a bus or on the metro, making her way to and from the hair salon where she works, her mother’s apartment where she lives, her boyfriend Loïc’s place. Félicie is not tragic like Flaubert’s Félicité, but she experiences the quiet ennui of many of Rohmer’s protagonists, the subtle desire for a transcendent experience, the sense that life should be more than what it is.
Félicie’s ennui is quite similar, in fact, to Jean-Louis Trintignant’s in My Night at Maud’s. Like him, Félicie finds her faith tested: she has committed herself to staying in Paris on the off-chance that she might run into Charles again, but after five years she wonders if it’s best to move on with her life. Thus, she decides to move with her lover Maxence to the town of Nevers, a choice which means forgoing a future with Charles. Later in the film, after leaving Nevers, she is likewise tempted by her boyfriend Loïc, whose intellectual sophistication and generosity promise a comfortable and interesting life for her and her daughter. But like Trintignant’s character, who in the film’s long central scene is tempted by the worldly, sophisticated, and alluring Maud, these other men represent for Félicie a spiritual surrender — abandoning her long commitment to Charles and acknowledging that maybe her worldview has been somewhat naive and that grace does not exist, that miracles, to use the language of the film, do not exist.
But, like Jean-Louis in My Night at Maud’s, Félicie ultimately commits herself to a spiritual life — and the crux of her character change occurs in the film’s most dramatic and moving scene, a scene that genuinely brought tears to my eyes the first time I saw it. I’m talking of course about the moment in the theatre, when Loïc takes her to see The Winter’s Tale. Rohmer, to his credit, does not downplay this allusion nor overexplain it — for those of us familiar with Shakespeare’s play, we’ll understand the deeper meaning of the unfolding scene, of King Leontes of Sicily approaching the statue of his wife Hermione as it comes to life before his eyes. But Félicie, as is emphasized, has never seen the play before, and hasn’t read or seen very much Shakespeare, and thus she experiences it as a true innocent, not like Loïc whose intellectualism gives him an ironic distance. To Félicie, this moment playing out before her is of course a variation of her own life story — she is the King, staring in wonder, and Hermione is Charles, brought back to life through this act of artistic magic. She weeps, and we, the audience, weep too, because we understand that Rohmer has accomplished something truly magnificent here, demonstrated to us in a single uninterrupted moment the true power of a work of art: Shakespeare’s play is to Félicie what Rohmer’s movie is to us. A Tale of Winter, The Winter’s Tale — two stories, layered atop each other, about the power of a miracle to restore a lost love.
After this moment, we get a long scene where Loïc drives Félicie home, and they discuss the play and her reaction to it. Rohmer here employs one of his classic long takes, with a stationary camera focused primarily on Félicie’s face. Because the car is moving, however, the shot becomes unexpectedly dynamic: the blurry movement behind Félicie through the window of the car reflects her own complex emotions. Loïc, ever the intellectual, questions what he calls an “ambiguity” of the play, about whether Hermione had been alive the whole time or whether the statue brought her back to life. “You don’t get it,” Félicie says. “Faith brings her to life.” She then proceeds to explain how in Nevers when she sat down in the church to pray, she had a moment of clarity about what she had to do — how she had to return to Paris and hope to find Charles again. Loïc, perhaps partly out of self interest, pushes back and says she shouldn’t ruin her life for something whose chances are so small. Félicie responds by insisting that though the chance is small, if she finds Charles she’ll experience “a joy so great [she’ll] gladly give [her] life for it.”
This, for Rohmer, is the root of faith — not a dogmatic belief in God but a structure for how to live an ordinary life. Félicie in this moment, twenty minutes from the end of the film, has reached a spiritual serenity that has thus far eluded her. She knows that finding Charles is unlikely, but instead of agonizing over whether to choose Maxence or Loïc, she commits herself to the chance that Charles might return. Loïc, the consummate intellectual, sees this as a mirror of Pascal’s wager — believing in God because the chance that he exists makes that faith worth the risk. Once again we have a direct connection to My Night at Maud’s, where Pascal and his wager are continually referenced.
The film ends, like The Green Ray, with a moment of catharsis. After finding Charles and being rewarded for her faith, Félicie breaks down in tears in her room. Charles asks what’s wrong and she tells him, in a line that moves me every time, that they are “tears of joy.” This is quite similar to the end of The Green Ray, when Delphine (Marie Rivière) finally sees the titual green ray. Like Delphine, Félicie has been on a personal journey of self-discovery — and in the end, she’s finally achieved her emotional release.
These moments from Rohmer, whether in A Tale of Winter, My Night at Maud’s, The Green Ray, or any of his other films featuring characters searching for this unnamed deeper experience of life, represent for me one of the key reasons why his films are so special. More than any other filmmaker, Rohmer captures the essence of finding spirituality amidst the mundane. When trying to describe a Rohmer film to others, I often find it difficult, because a simple summary never does justice to the profound emotional complexity of his stories. His characters, like us, live straightforward and ordinary lives — going to work, going home, searching for love, searching for meaning. But what in other hands might feel banal and too mundane Rohmer transforms into something powerfully spiritually. His 1987 film, for example, Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie in French) is a simple, straightforward, and somewhat low-stakes romantic comedy-drama about the complex love lives of fashionable young people — but towards the middle of the film, there is a scene in which the protagonist Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet) walks through a forest with her love interest Fabien (Éric Viellard). Looking around at the trees and the light filtering through the canopy and listening to the majesterial silence of nature, Blanche unexpectedly breaks down and begins to cry. For her, this is a spiritual moment, a spiritual moment amidst the ordinariness of her life, and the experience is so profound it leaves her unable to cope. Like the moment Félicie cries during the performance of The Winter’s Tale, it’s a feeling many of us have perhaps experienced — the sudden awareness that our lives have a greater meaning than we realized.
