A Tale of Autumn

The last film in Éric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons. Magali grows wine in the Rhône valley and has lost her husband. She lives alone and does not want to meet anyone. Her friend Isabelle places a newspaper advertisement on her behalf without telling her, and meets the man who answers herself; she intends to test him first. At the same time Rosine, the girlfriend of Magali's son, is planning to introduce her own former teacher to Magali. So two women are separately doing the same thing without knowing about each other, and Magali knows nothing at all. The narrative knots itself when these collide at a harvest celebration. The idea is Rohmer's known concern: people like to decide on other people's behalf and describe their own intentions to themselves wrongly. It takes place in the countryside, and the vineyards, the harvest and the conversations about wine make up the texture. Marie Rivière plays Isabelle and Béatrice Romand plays Magali; both worked with Rohmer over many years. It won the screenplay award at the Venice film festival in 1998. One of the most mature entries in the series for anyone who likes French cinema and films built on talk. For a viewer wanting incident, there is only talking across the film and the tension comes entirely from who knows what.