Critics reviews

One of Rohmer's few male protagonists (the film often feels like a throwback to the masculine bull sessions of the Moral Tales), Gaspard is reported to be a highly autobiographical character who runs through a composite of events from the director's life. Rohmer doesn't look back with nostalgia, but with a lucid gimlet eye, his Gaspard one of high ideals and evasive, indecisive actions.

[Rohmer's] method of composing conversations places a large amount of negative space around each subject, drawing the viewer's attention to the nuances of their physicality and how they interact with their surroundings. Rohmer lavishes attention on minor habits and gestures: Gaspard's tendency to either walk slightly ahead or lag slightly behind of Margot, which gives him an excuse to avoid direct eye contact.

These awkward, semi-tragic misconnections offer their own sense of playful delight, because they leave the mind buzzing in game-like speculation amidst the uncertainty. What's really going on with that person? What are they thinking? Difficult to grasp for all their delicacy, these moments where our standing with someone remains impalpable pass quickly through our lives.

One of the great things about this film is that, although we see a great range of behaviors in its women—everything from sulkiness, game-playing and hysteria to brutal honesty, pained disappointment and crushing heartache—we never want to judge them badly. They are full characters, vividly observed and realized—and such depth is rare. However, when it comes to Rohmer's gaze on the male hero, there is definitely room for judgment.

Summer flings with promiscuous babes might seem like frivolous material for a director approaching his eighth decade, but in Rohmer's hands, a gentle lark becomes a wise lament structured around the eternal conflict between living in the moment and biding time for some hypothetical, ideal future.

Mr. Rohmer, who died at 89 in 2010, was the master of ambivalence. His creatures are sympathetic and annoying, their entanglements dull yet fascinating. "A Summer's Tale" is droll but not exactly funny. The leisurely flow of events culminates with Léna's unexpected appearance. Gaspard finds himself triple-booked for an excursion to the nearby island of Ouessant, which, with its rocky coast and tricky tides, is a challenge to navigate and thus a metaphor for his situation.

What interests me is to show young people as they really [are], Rohmer said in a 2008 interview, "but also as they might be if they were 50 years old or a hundred years old, and the events of the film were taking place in ancient Greece, for things haven't changed all that much." The classical beauty of A Summer's Tale communicates this sentiment vividly and with quiet wonder.

The first two seasonal tales seem to end happily. The twist that comes in the last minutes of A Summer's Tale is slightly more ambiguous; its status as a happy ending depends on how much you are willing to dignify Gaspard's inability to choose between the three women competing for his affections.

The deus ex machina that delivers Gaspard from having to face up to his mistakes (sort of) is both entirely apt and rather hilarious, and will resonate with contemporary hipsters and those who are familiar with them, despite the movie being almost 20 years old itself. Some tropes never go out of style.

This minor, yet exceedingly tender, moment is most reflective of Rohmer's elegant filmmaking style as a mode of seemingly improvised collaboration, and as a whole, A Summer's Tale not only attests to his status as a master of perspective and characterization, but one with a keen eye for sun-drenched, luscious landscapes and all the fineries of human interaction that they rouse.

From the verbose intellectuals in his 1969 classic My Night at Maud'sto the loquacious lovers of 2007's erotic The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, director Eric Rohmer has always loved talk. Yet in this sublime 1996 love story, nearly ten minutes elapse before a line of dialogue is spoken—a tension-generating exception to the norm.

Gaspard's providential confidence in his artistic dreams also harks back to Rohmer's own inchoate days, as if the director had been waiting half a century for the artistry with which he could exorcise his memories of embarrassment, pain, and sexual frustration.