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A Tale of Winter @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Eric Rohmer was unsurpassed at creating intelligent romantic comedies and intelligent female characters. "A Tale of Winter," one of his most genial and audacious films, is a superb example of both. With Rohmer's characteristic delight in surprise and paradox, winter, not spring, is seen as the season of rebirth and renewal, and its tale begins on a sunny beach. A young couple, Félicie and Charles, meet while on holiday and fall deeply in love. In a fatal slip, she gives him the wrong address, and, as a result, he disappears from her life. Five years later, at Christmas time, Félicie is a hairdresser in the Paris suburbs with a daughter (by Charles) and two lovers: the successful Maxence and the intellectual Loïc. She loves them both, but, as she says, "There's love and love," and the love that counts is the one she still holds for the long-lost Charles.

"This is Rohmer at his very best," says Time Out London, "effortlessly and unsentimentally charting the absurd complexities of human psychology, while creating a compelling contemporary fairytale firmly rooted in the banality of everyday existence. It has, as ever, enormous compassion, wit and insight, and its ending is exquisitely affecting." And the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum concludes: "Rohmer has become such a master of his chosen classic genre -- the crystalline philosophical tale of character and romantic choice -- that this is a nearly perfect work, in performance as well as execution."

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Hunt, former film critic for the Riverfront Times and former adjunct professor of film studies at Webster University.