Over at Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney is taking a virtual vacation by watching director Éric Rohmer’s movies that are set in summer. And blogging about one of them every Tuesday. Yesterday it was The Green Ray. Scroll back for Pauline at the Beach, Claire’s Knee and La Collectionneuse.
Apart from Sweeney’s astute analysis, the posts are enriched by background revelations taken from the massive new Éric Rohmer, A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, recently translated into English. The Green Ray, we learn, was filmed by an all-female crew, from a tight script based on long conversations with lead actress Marie Rivière. She recalls Rohmer saying, “I’m reproached for writing sentences that are too long. But in life, people talk a long time without stopping. And I’m going to demonstrate that. No one will see the difference between a text I’ve written and an improvised text.”
There is much more in this and Sweeney’s previous posts to enrich our experience of watching Rohmer’s characters discuss love and life under the bright sun of summer.
--Julian