Eric Rohmer
conte d'hiver

In early 1990s France, a young hairdresser lives in the hope that the father of her daughter will reappear—a summer love that left behind a little person, dissolved by a wrong address. The second chapter of the Four Seasons Cycle, “A Tale of Winter” is very different from the previous chapter, “A Tale of Springtime.” In Rohmer's cinema, there is always an evident sexual tension, manifesting in many obsessions, not just physical but primarily intellectual. The female figures populating his films are almost always deep thinkers, rational on the surface, and often strategists and masters of their own fate. In “A Tale of Springtime,” love was made with the mind, featuring long, intense dialogues set in a scenario of intellectual isolation where the young philosophy professor (Anne Teyssèdre) got lost, drawn into the quotes from Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason.” In “A Tale of Winter,” it quickly opens up to explicit sex, the love consumed between the protagonist Félicie (Charlotte Véry) and her summer love (Frédéric van den Driessche), making it clear that they are on different tracks. Thus, Rohmer will tell us the story of the relationship between the young woman and her men—stand-ins as she waits for the photograph she keeps on her daughter's bedside table to come back to life. A film with a misleading plot, a sort of fairy tale where winter is a pretext for many movements of the heart, many uncertainties of a lonely, dreamy girl in a setting of poverty in the French countryside. A strangely light poetic Rohmer, with a surprise ending that is only foreseeable by paying close attention to the long theater sequence showing the play “The Winter’s Tale” by William Shakespeare, the true source of inspiration for the film.