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To truly connect with someone — romantically or platonically — is a rare occurrence. To not have had that emotional connection for so long is what led Delphine to despair, yet The Green Ray shows how even the most hopeless person can find optimism again in simple, everyday things.

Shot on super 16mm, the film looks as grainy as a beach picnic on a windy day. It has an unflinching naturalism and authenticity which makes this ambling, unfocused quest for an elusive good time into painfully compulsive viewing.

Rohmer finds the beauty in her intense ascetic solitude, and grants her an ending of offhand sublimity... Rohmer wanted the intimacy of a home movie, and got a tremblingly open-nerved performance from Rivière as a result.

As strict as the structure may sound, what distinguishes The Green Ray is its seasonally appropriate looseness. Shot by a crew of just four on grainy 16mm, it's a movie where characters and places are always coming and going, and scenes move in organic twirls of improvised dialogue. It feels like summer.

The payoff, at once simple and utterly miraculous, will send you out of the cinema floating, and a little puzzled about how Rohmer pulls off this modest but immensely potent emotional sleight of hand.

It is hard to express in a compelling, unhysterical fashion why Eric Rohmer's rhapsodic 1986 film, The Green Ray, stands among the headiest pinnacles of modern cinematic art. It's not a revolutionary film in any traditional sense of the word, and it's also a film whose modest concerns and production methods belie profound and intangible cosmic depths. Yet there are things about it which lend it a unique, quixotic quality which pushes it far above and beyond its contemporaries.

Eric Rohmer's 1986 drama may be the finest example of his supple and prickly artistry. Working with a scant crew, he blends fiction and documentary with a graceful splendor of Impressionist inspiration... The film's French title, "Le Rayon Vert" ("The Green Ray"), is that of a novel by Jules Verne, which intrudes surprisingly on the action, and which, like most of the movie's striking coincidences, conveys a retrospective sense of destiny.

I believe Rohmer's special genius as a writer/director was his uncanny ability to show, accurately and without condescension, the elaborate lengths to which human beings will go in order to deceive themselves. Marie Riviere is one of the best actresses Rohmer ever worked with, and she arguably nails this quality of self-deception better than anyone, including the brilliant Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud's.

No other metropolitan auteur has shown more interest in the countryside's tourist economy of recreation and aleatory romance; in SUMMER the seasides stay in the background, as Delphine attempts to transcend the ennui of heteronormative superstition.

The final scene is the suspense sequence of the decade, a miracle at sunset where, like Ingrid Bergman confronting the Stromboli volcano, Rohmer's heroine gazes directly out at the world and within herself and receives the deliverance of self-recognition. Her tears are ours.

Shooting on 16 mm, Rohmer catches partly improvised conversations, allowing overlapping dialogue and casual gestures (as when one of Delphine's friends turns her attention to a magazine on a side table). Played by Marie Rivière, Delphine speaks in a fluttering self-revising rush, vacillating between assertion and confession; whenever she gives up and her tears flow, which happens more than once, it feels unexpected and real, a break in the etiquette of smooth surfaces.

Rohmer relies on Rivière, who wrote most of her role herself, to ground his limpid study of a somewhat tiresome but radiant heroine waiting for salvation, and she manages to do that with a steady flurry of hopeful, slightly fumbling physical gestures with her hands and a persistent tic of looking up at the sky as if she's playing the coquette for God.