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In contrast with the dozen fireballs of his Nouvelle Vague colleagues, Eric Rohmer favors a hundred tiny match flares. Summer is his first season (Paris in August), his Lucky Pierre is an American moocher (Jess Hahn) with a half-finished sonata, disdain for aesthetes, and news of a vast inheritance. "I've always believed more in my luck than in my talent," he confesses in the middle of a nocturnal soiree, where a genius for picking up incisive curlicues of emotional data is already evident as characters drift in and out of rooms. (As a bonus, Jean-Luc Godard turns up for a gag in full kabuki-hipster mode.) The bohemian and the cosmic collide as the musician leans out the window in a fit of bravado and fires his rifle into the starry sky. Astrology ("the most ancient of sciences") works in mysterious ways, and, when his fortune doesn't come, the literally starving artist is reduced to dodging concierges, selling possessions for coins, spending nights on park benches, and filching from fruit stands. As the dilapidated figure wanders through the sweltering city, he notices the concrete wall encircling the Latin Quarter sidewalk café: A descent out of Zola and Hamsun, the "mortal silence" that could crumble any loquacious Rohmer protagonist into dust. One type of theater yields to another with the arrival of the bowler-hatted vagrant (Jean Le Poulain), which is where Renoir's Boudu meets Beckett's Estragon and fate and chance wrestle over the rake's progress. Sturges figures in the punchline (Christmas in July), just the finale for a view of grace under blasting sunlight and heavenly constellations. With Michèle Girardon, Van Doude, Paul Bisciglia, Christian Alers, and Stéphane Audran. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |