... in lover's meetings as Feste tells us in Twelfth Night and Rohmer appears to have taken this as his starting point. Rather surprisingly it is relatively late in the canon, now some twelve years old it feels more like the stuff he was turning out forty years ago. Essentially this is our old friend the portmanteau movie, three films for the price of one. In this case love/romance is the recurring motif and none of the three stories is resolved satisfactorily. In the opener a girl who is very much in love discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her; in the second, a girl is living with a man with whom she has fallen out of love and seeing, though not sleeping with, a second man. About to become the lover of the second man she realizes that her supposedly dull live-in lover is enjoying an assignation - whilst supposedly out of town - at the very hotel which she has selected for her own romantic rendez-vous whilst in the third a painter who has been 'fixed up' with a Swedish girl abandons her when he forms an instant attraction to a girl he sees in the street, who turns out to be newly married.
Rohmer's interest seems to be in turning over rocks and observing what kind of creatures scuttle from under them; he will follow them for a while and then leave them to find their own way back or not, as the case may be. As often with Rohmer a great deal of the pleasure is in seeing Paris in all its aspects. It probably won't convert anyone who isn't already a fan but neither did this, the tenth Rohmer film I've seen, make me resolve to give up on him.
Rohmer's interest seems to be in turning over rocks and observing what kind of creatures scuttle from under them; he will follow them for a while and then leave them to find their own way back or not, as the case may be. As often with Rohmer a great deal of the pleasure is in seeing Paris in all its aspects. It probably won't convert anyone who isn't already a fan but neither did this, the tenth Rohmer film I've seen, make me resolve to give up on him.