Rendezvous in Paris

Éric Rohmer's anthology of three independent stories turns on the theme of rendezvous in Paris: a student discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her, an unnamed woman keeps meeting a literature teacher from the suburbs in city parks, and in a third segment named after a Picasso painting, a painter becomes fascinated by a stranger. The three stories are stitched together by a girl singing in the streets to accordion accompaniment, a nod to René Clair's Sous les toits de Paris. Rohmer kept this outside the Tales of the Four Seasons cycle he was making at the time, shooting it with a crew of six to eight people on leftover 16mm negative from earlier projects. He obtained filming permits under a code name, posing as a small French Canadian crew making a documentary about Parisian benches, and the cast agreed to take a share of future profits instead of upfront fees. Passersby frequently assumed they were watching a student film or a documentary. Critics often single out the middle segment as one of Rohmer's finest achievements. Who it's for: Admirers of Rohmer's talk driven, unadorned Paris films and of French anthology cinema. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting incident and tension, since the film consists almost entirely of coincidence, conversation and walking.