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3 - 15 September 2018: Éric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons

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A Tale of Springtime
Éric Rohmer
1990 | 108 min | Colour | Digital
French with English subtitles

Éric Rohmer inaugurated “Tales of the Four Seasons”, a new cycle of his sophisticated moral parables, with this delightful, elegant comedy of manners. A Tale of Springtime is set to the music of Beethoven and Schumann, and unfolds in chic Paris apartments and a Fontainebleau country house. As always in Rohmer, gestures, intonations, and seemingly causal dialogue become the stuff of a remarkably nuanced, novelistic analysis of motives, meaning, and interior moral life. read more

A Tale of Winter
Éric Rohmer
1992 | 114 min | Colour | Digital
French with English subtitles

Éric Rohmer’s late-career triumph is among the writer-director’s most articulate, affecting, and earnest explorations of love and faith, in an oeuvre replete with variations on those themes. Either a Christian parable or an ode to cosmic coincidence – or some medley of both – Rohmer’s wintry romance centres on Félicie (Charlotte Véry), a single mother and Parisian coiffeuse who, five years earlier, had a passionate affaire de cœur while on vacation that ended with a botched exchange of addresses and a baby en route. read more

A Summer’s Tale
Éric Rohmer
1996 | 113 min | Colour | Digital
French with English subtitles

The third film in Rohmer’s sublime Four Seasons cycle reunites the veteran auteur with Amanda Langlet, the sun-kissed teen heroine of Pauline at the Beach, for another beguiling, beachside tale of jeune amour. Repartee, as usual in Rohmer, only deflects from the emotional honesty so needed of the snowballing situation. read more

An Autumn Tale
Éric Rohmer
1998 | 110 min | Colour | Digital
French with English subtitles

The last of Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons”, the quartet which would be his final series, An Autumn Tale is a magisterial late work – gentle, autumnal and mellow – that remains among the director’s very finest. In contrast to the dominant emphasis on youth in so much of his previous work, Rohmer now focuses instead on two middle-aged friends, played by his two favourite actresses, Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romaine. read more