Rohmer’s most honest film follows a woman through a summer she cannot survive, and saves her at the last possible moment. What it cannot decide is whether that salvation is grace or luck.
Biarritz. 21 September 1985. Visibility: clear. Wind: west, light. Cloud cover: none. Sunset: 19:42. Green ray: observed. Duration: approximately two seconds. Witnesses: two. Note: phenomenon requires specific atmospheric conditions. Cannot be induced. Cannot be predicted with certainty. Either present or not.
| Director | Éric Rohmer |
|---|---|
| Year | 1986 |
| Runtime | 98 minutes |
| Cast | Marie Rivière, Lisa Hérédia, Béatrice Romand, Vincent Gauthier |
| Awards | Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
Five Rohmer reviews have built toward a single claim: every Rohmer film protects its clearest-eyed figure from the full cost of their clarity. In My Night at Maud’s, the theological framework absorbs the weight. In Claire’s Knee, the cinematography aestheticises it before it can land. In La Collectionneuse, the title surrenders Haydée’s story to Adrien’s narration before the film begins. In Pauline at the Beach, youth and genre cushion the blow. The protection shifts across films; the protection holds. Writing The Green Ray now as the subject, the claim requires its most careful revision yet: in this film, Rohmer removes the protection for ninety-five of the film’s ninety-eight minutes. Then he restores it at sunset.
The Green Ray was made in 1985 and 1986 across several summers, shot on handheld 16mm with a minimal crew, much of the dialogue improvised by Marie Rivière from her own feelings and experiences. Rohmer has said he followed her rather than directed her, which is the most precise description of the film’s formal method and its emotional register. The result looks like a documentary about a woman having a very bad summer, which is essentially what it is. Delphine (Rivière) has been abandoned by a friend who was supposed to holiday with her, and spends the next eight weeks trying and failing to find somewhere she can be comfortable: Cherbourg with a friend’s family, the mountains with acquaintances, Paris alone, finally Biarritz alone, where on the last day of summer she meets a young man on a train platform and they watch the sunset from a cliff and see the green ray.
The title refers to Jules Verne: the optical phenomenon, visible at the precise moment the sun disappears below the sea, that grants whoever sees it the power to read their own heart and the hearts of others. The film’s epigraph quotes Verne directly. Rohmer places this premise before the film and then withholds the phenomenon for its entire runtime, letting Delphine earn it the hardest possible way.
The dinner party scene in Cherbourg is the film’s first great truth. Delphine is sitting at a table with people who are having a comfortable dinner, trading comfortable observations, and someone mentions that they are eating meat, and Delphine is a vegetarian, and the conversation pivots to her vegetarianism, and she begins to cry and excuses herself. The vegetarianism is the occasion but not the cause. The cause is that she has been sitting at a table where everyone is performing ease, and she cannot perform ease, and the performance gap has become unbearable. She knows this is unreasonable by the social standards of a dinner table. She cannot make herself reasonable. She leaves.
The film is full of scenes like this: Delphine on the edge of groups, almost connecting and then not, turning down men who interest her for reasons she cannot fully articulate, arriving at beautiful places and finding them insufficient, weeping in locations that did not ask for weeping. The people around her find this exhausting. The film does not. This is Rohmer’s great formal achievement in The Green Ray: he follows Delphine without the narrative apparatus that the prior Moral Tales used to manage their protagonists’ interiority. No voiceover, no philosophical framework, no title that categorises her before she can speak. Just Rivière’s face, close, unguarded, doing the specific work of being Delphine in a world that keeps asking her to be someone easier.
Delphine is not difficult. She is honest in a world that mistakes honesty for difficulty. The summer keeps presenting her with opportunities to perform being fine, and she cannot.
What the five prior reviews could not quite say, because The Green Ray was always the promised destination, is that Rohmer’s clearest-eyed figures have always been women. The Moral Tales give the narration to men, which means the men’s categorisations arrive before the films can question them. But the figures who actually see clearly — Maud, Claire (in those two seconds when she looks at the camera), Haydée at the breakfast table, Pauline watching the adults implode — are always women. The Green Ray removes the men entirely. The film is almost exclusively Delphine and other women, and the occasional man who enters briefly and cannot quite reach her. Rohmer did not give the narration to the women in the prior films because the structure of the Moral Tales required a male narrator. Here there is no narrator, and the film can finally follow what it was always interested in.
The ending. The young man on the platform in Biarritz is charming and unforced and clearly interested in Delphine, and she allows it this time in a way she has not allowed things before. They find the cliff. The sun is going down. Another couple beside them mentions the green ray: the legend, the possibility. Delphine goes still. She has read Jules Verne. She knows the legend. The conditions are correct. They watch. The sun reaches the horizon. The green ray appears — two seconds, a shimmer of green at the edge of the world, real and verifiable and completely beyond anyone’s control — and Delphine presses her face into the young man’s shoulder and closes her eyes.
The film presents this as arrival. The Rohmer thread’s argument would say: this is also the moment the protection is restored. Delphine has not changed. She has not learned to be easier, less herself, more socially manageable. She has simply endured until the conditions were correct and the phenomenon appeared. The green ray is not a reward for growth. It is a reward for persistence. And the film cannot quite decide whether persistence is enough, whether the universe’s gift of the right evening with the right light and someone kind beside you is grace or simply what occasionally happens if you survive long enough to see it.
The film in this archive that creates the sharpest friction is our review of Summertime, David Lean’s 1955 film about Jane Hudson alone in Venice, another woman who has carried her honest loneliness into a beautiful landscape and waited for it to be recognised. Lean gives Jane a brief affair and then the train back to Ohio: the world acknowledges her briefly and then releases her. The ending is not grace. It is what actually happens most of the time. What The Green Ray offers that Summertime refuses is the possibility that the world can, occasionally, at the last possible moment, deliver the two seconds it owes you. The difference between the two films is not optimism versus pessimism. It is the difference between a filmmaker who cannot justify the gift and one who decides, finally, to give it anyway.
The Rohmer thread can now be named fully: across six films, the mechanism that protects the clearest-eyed figure changes, but the figure is always a woman, and the protection is always arranged by a man holding the camera. In The Green Ray, Rohmer holds the camera as close to Delphine as he has ever held it to anyone, follows her without the apparatus of the Moral Tales, removes every formal buffer, and then, at sunset, gives her what she could not have given herself. Whether this is the most generous thing Rohmer ever did or the most conditional is a question the film leaves open, glowing faintly green at the horizon, for exactly two seconds, and then gone.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Summertime (Lean, 1955): reviewed here; another woman carrying honest loneliness through a beautiful summer landscape, but where the ending refuses the gift The Green Ray allows itself — and the contrast between the two reveals what each filmmaker believes the world owes its clearest-eyed people.
Contempt (Godard, 1963): a marriage filmed as it dissolves in Italian light, where Godard turns the camera’s complicity in the male gaze into the subject rather than the method — and where the woman at the center is allowed far less time than she deserves, which is itself the argument.
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