Le Beau Mariage [1982] [DVD]

This film by Eric Rohmer from the early 1980s is well worth exploring. It's his usual subtle and (seemingly) gentle examination of emotional lives, in which we gradually see the characters' weaknesses and delusions even though they themselves cannot.

'Le Beau Mariage' was mostly filmed in the cobbled old town of Le Mans and as ever the people and locations feel completely real and authentic, and hardly cinematic or artificial at all. The most unique part of the experience of watching a Rohmer film is this almost documentary feel, achieved through a simple, unpretentious filming style and an emphasis on 'ordinary' places and characters. Either this will bore you (in which case you clearly aren't interested in people!) or, as for me and many others, it'll be endlessly fascinating.

I like most Rohmer films, but I found this one difficult to enjoy. The central character is Sabine, who we are to believe is 25 and a few weeks from her deadline to hand in her MA thesis, and she also has a day job. Yet she has lots of time to swan around and chase after a man who no longer shows her any interest and is clearly avoiding her. We never see her fretting over her thesis. Anyway, apart from all that she is like a 14 year-old, a rather silly one at that.

If you are considering a Rohmer film for the first time, I can recommend My Night At Maud's, or The Green Ray, or A Summer's Tale to start with, each of which I've watched a few times.

Part of Eric Rohmer`s Comedies et Proverbes series of films, this is perhaps slighter than most, with a central character, the impetuous Sabine, who is hard to like very much, and who finds herself in pursuit of a man she`s met briefly on the rebound from a tired affair with a philandering married man.
We see the milieu in which she goes from her unsatisfying job in an antique shop in the old quarter of Le Mans, via a poky pied a terre in Paris, and her mother`s house where her younger sister also lives. We also meet her easy-going friend Clarisse, a well-to-do artist with her own shop and happy marriage. So Sabine wants a happy marriage of her own. The man she sets her sights on, a high-flying lawyer named Edmond, is (to the viewer) obviously not interested, but still she blindly ploughs on through thick and, mostly, thin. The final showdown in his office, which does not go quite as either we or the mismatched pair might have guessed, is not exactly an anti-climax, as there hasn`t been much of a crescendo in the first place, but is of a piece with this enjoyable, oddly contrary film.
Any film by Rohmer is, in my book, worth watching. He`s one of my two or three favourite directors. Here he uses three actors who would reappear, to greater effect, in his next film, the wonderful Pauline a la Plage. The radiant Arielle Dombasle (now a famous name in France, as actress and singer) plays the patient friend Clarisse with her usual naturalness and warmth, while Pascal Greggory has a cameo as a party-goer, and Feodor Atkine plays, as he was to do in Pauline, the philanderer.
The film belongs to Rohmer regular Beatrice Romand, who has the unenviable task of making the high-maintenance Sabine both credible and at all likeable. She manages the first with stunning aplomb - her performance being full of energy and sly humour - and just about injects her character with enough sympathy to elicit ours too. She is an offbeat actress, unusual in that she`s not like the general run of French actresses, with a ruddy, crinkly-haired charm all her own.
Not Rohmer at his very best, but well worth watching more than once.