(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
The Green Ray (sometimes known as “Summer” due to a quirk in its American distribution) is one of Rohmer’s more personal films, which is saying a lot. His films are typically about well-defined individuals coming to terms with themselves through a moral or emotional crisis. Rohmer’s indirect style lets us follow them during these periods as disconnected observers. This is not to say that we are disinterested, just removed enough that we can often appreciate the gentle comedy of their circumstances.
In this film, Delphine is one of those people that we would probably have a hard time being friends with in real life anyway. She herself is intent on maintaining an awkward distance from those around her. Every August true Parisians vacate the city, and this summer Delphine has plans to go to Greece with a girlfriend. When this friend backs out, Delphine having recently broken up with her boyfriend is forced to make other plans, eventually ending up at the beach with a different friend. There at the beach house though she finds her fifth wheel status unbearable, a constant reminder of her disconsolate loneliness. After returning to Paris she decides to borrow her ex-husband’s Alpine condo, and then instead wanders all the way down to the shore near Biarritz.
Most of the film is involved with cataloging Delphine’s problems. It is odd that American distributors decided to call the film “Summer,” as there is nothing warm and inviting about Delphine and her predicament. Her conversations with others often devolve into persnickety defenses of her personal quirks, she doesn’t seem interested in things like beach volleyball, relaxing at a ski resort, or letting guys make passes at her in the discotheque. It begins to dawn on Delphine that her tearful restlessness may just be symptomatic of a deeper species of gloom, one that has no solution in place or person.
Rather, Delphine eventually stumbles across the strange atmospheric condition known as “The Green Ray.” Eavesdropping on an interesting conversation, she hears about how Jules Verne used this strange event as the title to one of his novels. The green ray is the last spectrum of refraction that occurs sometimes when the rays of the setting sun hit the curvature of the earth just right. Immediately before the sun drops beneath the horizon it will flash vibrantly green just for an instant. For Verne, those lucky enough to see this happen will also for that moment be granted supernatural clarity into their own hearts and the hearts of those around them.
Delphine realizes that this sort of clarity is exactly what she has been looking for. She needs just a glimmer of certainty about herself and a companion, just one moment in which she can safely align herself towards something other than loneliness. And eventually it happens. She meets a man in the Biarritz train station, and on an uncharacteristic whim, Delphine joins him on the next train out of town. They stand together facing the sea at sunset. They wait as the sun slowly drops towards the distant water. We wait with them. And then it happens.
Rohmer reportedly waited quite a long time until he could actually catch the green ray on film. If he couldn’t actually find the atmospheric conditions at the right time with his camera rolling, then the film wouldn’t have worked. Or else the film would have ended with Delphine never meeting that magical moment that Rohmer had so studiously prepared for her. But we wait there with Delphine and her companion, and the sun flashes brilliantly green but for a moment before it vanishes below the curvature of the earth.
In many ways this is an uncharacteristic film for Rohmer. Not only did he put a lot of stock into an image that practically would be difficult to catch on film, but much of the script was improvised and the entire thing was shot on 16 mm. This is also the only film to which Rohmer added a score, and surprisingly enough, he wrote it. Furthermore, in the scope of Rohmer’s oeuvre, the fact that he commits to resolving the crisis of one of his characters through such a magical, numinous, and overtly literary moment is stunning. To one of his profoundest emotional studies he appends an equally provocative, almost transcendental, solution. On the basis of such remarkable features, The Green Ray stands out among Rohmer’s work, and quite frankly is probably his best.