The Green Ray

Éric Rohmer worked without a script here. He built a storyline and let the actors improvise the dialogue. Marie Rivière created the character of Delphine together with Rohmer, and he gave her a full writing credit; the lines you hear are her own words. Delphine's holiday plans collapse and she spends the summer trying to find somewhere to be without becoming a burden. Friends invite her, she goes, she does not fit, she comes back. She goes to Biarritz and sits alone by the sea. She goes to Cherbourg. Almost nothing happens, and her loneliness is continually treated by other people as a problem to be solved; everyone tells her what she should do. The title comes from Jules Verne's novel of the same name, which Rohmer had read as a child: a romance in the Scottish highlands about a young woman who avoids love until she sees the green ray. It is the flash that appears for an instant above the horizon as the sun sets, and in the legend whoever sees it can read their own heart and the heart of the person in front of them. Delphine overhears a group of older people discussing it, and the film's ending is carried by that expectation. Marie Rivière plays Delphine. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice. Who it is for: viewers who like Rohmer's cinema of conversation and small collapses inside ordinary life. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident. Nobody decides anything, Delphine cries often, and the pace is deliberately low.