MOVIE REVIEW : The Parisian Springtime of French Master Rohmer

“Tale of Springtime” (at the Hillcrest Cinemas), the latest film by France’s 73-year-old master Eric Rohmer, and the start of his new four-film seasonal cycle, has a springlike clarity. But it also seethes with that slightly desperate, boiling unease that can come after the vernal equinox. There’s nothing sluggish or sultry about Rohmer’s springtime. Outside, the air of Paris or Fountainebleau is crisp and achingly clear. Inside, there’s a constant thrum of tension, twanging the finely tuned wires of his characters’ consciousness.

*

Swiftly and subtly, we follow the often startling progress of Rohmer’s central quartet: Jeanne, a philosophy teacher at the Lycee Jacques Brel (Anne Teyssedre); Natacha, a teen-age classical pianist (Florence Darel); Igor, her art bureaucrat father (Hugues Quester), and Eve, his lover (Eloise Bennett). And, gradually, among this foursome--three “family” members and a bemused and increasingly uncomfortable outsider--the tiniest gestures assume momentous significance.

Rohmer is dealing here with his favorite subject, the sensual lives of the intelligentsia, and, as in all of his famous ‘60s-’70s “Moral Tales,” with the dilemma of a person suddenly swerved from one romance into another. The plot starts as if by chance. Jeanne and Natacha, two women who don’t know each other, meet at a party at which neither really belongs. Sympatico flares up immediately and Natacha seizes on the fact that Jeanne is temporarily homeless--that a cousin has borrowed her regular apartment and another one that Jeanne shares with a mathematician-lover depresses her too much when he is away.

Both the main actresses, Teysseddre and Darel, are real screen beauties, but atypical ones, Teysseddre with her pixie brown cut, watchful eyes and seemingly unshakable poise, Darel with her charmingly lanky frame, angelic frizz of hair and bewitchingly unguarded smile. (And also, because she plays Schumann’s “Songs of Dawn” for us on screen.) But what affects you most is the spark of intelligence leaping between them, even when Natacha is at her most maddening and selfish. The other two, Quester and Bennett as father and mistress, complement them in comic style: Quester as an over-talky seducer and Bennett catching the essence of yuppie intellectual competitiveness.

Rohmer’s detractors insist that nothing happens in his films. They’re wrong, particularly so here. Watching these gently agonizing scenes, in which Jeanne the outsider is constantly thrust into intimacies she hasn’t asked for, becomes both invigorating and tense.

The beauty of Rohmer’s films--and they are among the most beautiful and enlightening in world cinema right now--lies precisely in their mix of ordinary events and the acute consciousness with which they’re observed, and also in his character’s poignant, and usually unrealizable, quest for perfection. As we watch, they elevate and enlarge our own consciousness. They’re delightful films, and “Tale of Springtime” at its best is as entrancing as any of them, radiantly alive, blissfully aware. “Tale of Springtime” (MPAA-rated PG, though it is surely for adults), is a must-see, a picture to take heart from. Unpretentiously brilliant, it’s an essential work from a director who somehow, magically, keeps his vision fresh as a sudden rain, brighter than noon, and younger than, well, springtime.