Opens with 80’s dance music… I’ve been thrown off by the music in my early-decade French films lately. Sabine is Béatrice Romand from Autumn Tale, and the good marriage is all in her head – her boyfriend is married to someone else, but she starts fantasizing and telling everyone she’s getting married. As soon as that proves impossible, she meets André Dussolier at a wedding, and gets ahead of herself again, quitting her job, believing that she’ll marry him and not have to work anymore, even though he keeps ditching her for work reasons. Good ending on a train, leaving the future open.
Dave Kehr:
The second installment of Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” is, like The Aviator’s Wife, a study in destructive imagination and the limitations of personal perspectives — which is to say that the characters talk as much as they did in the “Six Moral Tales,” but no one really hears what they’re saying.
Romand got an award at Venice, where Wenders and Zanussi also took prizes. Her blonde painter friend is Arielle Dombasle, last seen as the “American” in Time Regained.