The Green Ray review: Verdant and vibrant

Some decades ago, Sylvester Stallone, among the finest cultural commentators of our time, expressed his distaste for French cinema. Films from that country were, apparently, all: “Yak, yak, yak!” Was he perhaps thinking of work by the veteran listener Éric Rohmer? It’s not just that the great man focuses on verbose characters. He focuses on characters whose verbosity threatens to drive patient viewers mildly barmy.

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 1986 (the hair and the pants pinpoint the era precisely), The Green Ray is, in many ways, an archetypal Rohmer picture. Marie Rivière plays Delphine, a Parisian secretary cast adrift when the city clears out and her own holiday plans get destroyed. She heads off to join another friend at the seaside, but, not much enjoying being single, soon flees back to the capital. Eventually, she ends up in beautiful, but hollow, Biarritz, where she hears chatter about the mysterious transformative glow in Jules Verne's novel The Green Ray. Later, something spooky seems to happen.

Rohmer has things to say about the cheapness of contemporaneous sexual politics. But

The Green Ray

is, as ever with Éric, a character study above anything else. Delphine is an obsessive who rants irrationally about the virtues of eating vegetables. “Lettuce is a friend,” she says in one typically infuriating exchange. Nonetheless, her furious integrity identifies her as a heroine among less easily compromised drones.

Rohmer was only semi- attached to the New Wave of the early 1960s. He was initially more of a literary figure and it was not until 1969, when My Night at Maud's scored with critics, that he had his first significant hit. But The Green Ray confirms that he stayed truer to the original principles than many of the founding fathers. The film was shot energetically on 16mm and made copious use of improv. As a result, nearly 30 years after its release, The Green Ray still feels fresh as friendly lettuce.