Synopsis
Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece, Pauline, on a vacation to Granville. There, she meets an old love...
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Pauline at the Beach
1983 ‘Pauline à la plage’ Directed by Éric Rohmer
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Alternative Titles
Pauline en la playa, 해변의 폴린느
Popular reviews
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Eric Rohmer or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Horny Tales of Summer Romance
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the greatest. and yet, A TALE OF SUMMER is somehow even *more* the greatest. imagine that. i can't cycle through Rohmer fast enough, if only so I can start again and better suss out this film's place in his world.
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I'm a Rohmer girl, in a Rohmer world
Life in plastic, it's fantastic
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, film is your creation -
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It would be nice to have a beach-house in which to breezily stumble through erotic entanglements and learn life lessons.
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Pauline at the Beach is a trivial film, but utterly charming. Mostly it is just talks of love, all between a small group of characters. At first it is a film of kisses and dances. Then love and sex. Finally it becomes a film of deceit and confusion, bringing conflict at last. Although Pauline at the Beach is just about a few characters working out their relationships during a small holiday, it is oddly engaging. This is a film just about watching people make mistakes, especially as in the end the film find villains in its scumbag men. Pauline at the Beach may merely be a collection of amorous escapades, but it presents love as insanity and creates something moving despite the slight presentation.
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Rohmer's voice isn't as particularly well-known amidst the best French New Wave filmmakers along the likes of Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, which is quite a shame because there's no doubt that he's one of the most thoughtful filmmakers to have arisen from the movement. The third film in Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" series following The Aviator's Wife and A Good Marriage, this is the most I've found myself entertained watching any of Rohmer's films. Not to say his work was any less enthralling but it has come to stick in my head within time because I've almost in some sense found a common comfort prominent within how he weaves conversations between characters together. But add it to the delivery…
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It’s Claire’s Knee with whackier hijinks and more dynamics to explore when the pedophile character is in a supporting role instead of the lead, not to mention my favorite Rohmer archetype: the chad teenager who shouldn’t have gotten caught up in all this. The ending gives Oldboy a run for its money and applies to far more (and far darker) situations than the incredibly specific (and comical!) scenario that happens here, to the point where I’d call it the quintessential “we’ll never know what happened in that room” moment despite the film showing us exactly what happened in the room.
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Luxurious shots of a beach that feels both warm and chilly at the same time provides only the vaguest notion of the dense web of two-timers and lovelorn fools who meet up on the sand for various romantic liaisons. The men have girlfriends back home but look for vacation squeezes (well, except for one self-pitying Nice Guy™ who prefers to pine over an uninterested friend), while the women try to carve something meaningful from spontaneous fun. They can be a loathsome group, with only the teenaged Pauline clear-headed enough to sit back and observe the rest, speaking up only when the games affect her. Her cousin, though, is so deluded that she has to conscript Pauline into her own denial to avoid facing what her younger companion can maturely process just fine.