The Green Ray

Wednesday, August 10 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door

THE GREEN RAY
Directed by Éric Rohmer • 1986
In French with English subtitles.
Delphine is a young secretary with a problem: she has two months of paid vacation time and nobody with whom to spend it. True, she had a fiancé once, maybe, and she might enjoy a week in Cherbourg or Biarritz, if you pressed her, but Delphine’s favorite hobby is disputation and she would surely quibble with the premise. Also: she doesn’t eat meat, she finds your family exhausting, and she would just like some time alone in the woods, all right? But The Green Ray isn’t a case study of depression, or a heart-warming story of a young woman who needed a puppy to revive her soul or some such: it is instead an exuberant and unapologetic act of engagement with the world, a prickly essay on the futility of compromise. A largely improvised fiction structured around uninflected passages from Delphine’s diary, The Green Ray stands as one of Rohmer’s most supple and effortless films, an interior monologue that speaks aloud and often. Its greatest asset is Rohmer axiom and co-author Marie Rivière, whose steely performance as Delphine anchors The Green Ray through each and every scene, a resolute woman drifting through an occult summer. (She’s a Capricorn, which explains everything.) An hour goes by before we learn the meaning of the film’s title, but by then, the alchemical luminance of the 16mm cinematography has already demonstrated that any phenomenon that can be described can also be seen. (KW)
98 min • Les films du losange • 35mm from The Film Desk
Preceded by: “Private Eye Popeye” (Seymour Kneitel, 1954) – 7 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Society collections