The Green Ray is certainly a strange fish - quite simply it's about a single girl's (almost)wasted summer, going on holiday 3 times, and each time finding herself bored and frustrated, and ultimately an outsider. We see scene after scene of holiday makers having a good time, and poor Delphine just not feeling at ease. She is somewhat opinionated, for example in the vegetarian lecture - we've all had to sit through one of those, and liable to burst into self-pitying tears, but Delphine never the less gets my respect for her refusal to opt for second best.

Very few directors would be brave enough to make a film like this, but Rohmer pulls it off magnificently, and in the process delivers one of his finest movies. I can see why some viewers might find it a waste of time, but having been on a couple of solo holidays in the past I can sympathise with Delphine's predicament. Plus The Green Ray rewards the patient with a truly poetic finale.

Disappointingly finding the Blu-Ray to be faulty, (which due to a lack of receipt means I can't replace it or sell the set on!) I was relieved to discover that the DVD version of this entry in Rohmer's loose film series played fine,which led to me getting ready to go on a summer holiday.

The plot:

Hit by a breakup just before her summer holiday, Delphine decides to join a friend on a beach house weekend.Almost from the moment she takes her first steps in the beach house, Delphine finds her pal trying to get her to confirm to her idea of what a good holiday is. Running off (talk about giving someone a chance!) Delphine isolates herself in search of the perfect holiday.

View on the film:

Skipping into the season with Delphine,co-writer/(along with lead actress Marie Rivière) director Éric Rohmer & cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux cast a warm,floral atmosphere,where water colour blue, greens and yellows sway in the fine breeze.Shot with just a crew of 4 people and the cast improvising the dialogue from Rohmer's outline,Rohmer's restrains himself from showing any sign of rebellion in the limited set-up,by spanning the title with frozen wide shots.

Along with cutting the free-flowing nature on offer away,leads to the film being rather dry. Threaded with improvised dialogue from the cast, Marie Rivière offers a shimmering image of isolation as Delphine,that is left to sadly fade by the dialogue having a sawn- off, stilted quality which blocks a full view of the sun and Delphine from being cast across the screen.

As a movie buff weaned on the Hollywood classics of the thirties and forties via endless reruns on TV I absorbed by osmosis the 'classic' style of film-making - Master Shot, Long Shot, Medium Shot, Close Shot, 2-Shot, Reverse Angle etc - without being able to put a name to them and this is perhaps why I find Rohmer 'amateur' in terms of Style. I have reached the conclusion that 1) he doesn't 'know' how to make fluid films, 2) he does know but has only contempt for this kind of 'professionalism' or 3) can't afford multiple set-ups for each scene and so settles for the 'boring' option.

This particular movie - given away with a British newspaper - begins with a long shot in which two girls are talking in an office. A third girl enters the scene and has a telephone conversation. Rohmer shoots the WHOLE thing in what would be, in the Real film-making world, a Master Shot with a static camera. Time and time again we get something similar, not necessarily a Long Shot, sometimes he even gives us a Close Shot that lasts interminably. I'm guessing that his shooting ratio is one of the shortest of any director, about one-to-one, two-to-one at the outside. Filming like this means, of course, that you'd better have something really riveting to say or you're going to alienate anyone who has access to TV reruns and/or a video/DVD player. Arguably viewers born some ten or twenty years after Rohmer helped establish the short-live New Wavelet will accept these crude methods never having known Style but the rest of us are obliged to look at Content and all too often come up empty. This entry benefits from a fine central performance but that's about it.