Le rayon vert [The Green Ray aka Summer] (1986)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) Here’s a weird, weird case of literary adaptation—or maybe appropriation: When I recorded Le rayon vert, I thought I was getting an adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel—a curio in his bibliography, a romantic comedy motivated by a singular optic phenomenon encountered whenever sunsets and bodies of water meet. Having read the breezy novel as a teenager, I remembered a few good bits from it and was looking forward to the highlights of the story (including the rather ironic ending). Alas, maybe, the film is not that: writer-director Éric Rohmer delivers something different that actually mentions and discusses Verne’s novel in a different context. So: as the film begins, we realize that we’re stuck with a young French woman with a pathologic inability to make up her mind. Her summer vacations consist in floating from one thing to another, criss-crossing France in the hope of having a meaningful adventure or, failing that, then something like a relationship to replace the void left by her breakup. It’s on the Atlantic coast that she hears about the green flash that happens when the sun sets on the ocean, and the mythical properties of the moment that were popularized in Verne’s novel. It all leads to a happy ending, but in order to get there you have to get through Rohmer’s largely improvisational approach to filmmaking, with non-actors being captured in dialogue, the protagonist not doing much of anything, and a very, very loose “script” guiding an approach that is often more visual than plot-driven. I still kind-of, sort-of tolerated the results: It was interesting to figure out when the Verne novel connection would come in, and for all of her maddening indecisiveness, the heroine eventually grown upon viewers as a figure of sympathy. I am still, however, waiting for a film adaptation of the Verne novel.