EN
“The conception may be a little too rigorously Catholic for some tastes (including mine), but Rohmer has become such a master of his chosen classic genre – the crystalline philosophical tale of character and romantic choice – that this is a nearly perfect work, in performance as well as execution, with an apposite if ambiguous extended reference to Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale in the penultimate act.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum
“In Rohmer’s work film has found one of its own ways, among the arts, of marking the intersection of contingency and necessity, of chance and logic. So an initial question in the case of Rohmer’s discoveries of his medium is: How has he – for whom has he – found subjects (meaning persons and places and topics) that, on film, render the exploration of such ordinary questions of metaphysics, or such metaphysical questions of the ordinary, representable and of continuous interest.”
Stanley Cavell
“A Tale of Winter is a very intelligent, very moving film. The images were made from the endless distance of the other side of the universe; they do not carry the characters but look for them, reach for them without being able to give them anything back. The poor attention of those images alone is enough for the spectator! The director does not wrap his story but leaves it vulnerable on the table among crumpled newsprint. He does not film in a precise and emphatic manner, with razor-sharp concentration, but from a distance, al fresco: the ‘brush’ tied to a very long stick. He applies only very rough strokes and lines; the essence is there in a single line (a single shot), without the pretence of the essential! The film adds nothing to the characters but lets them exist, in themselves, within the frame but also separate from it.”
Dirk Lauwaert
“Felicie travels between places but more deeply, she travels between options, between ways of living, reality and fantasy, truth and lies. The truth is that she loves Charles. That is what matters, that love she feels. Her reality though is that she will probably never see him again. The film concerns itself with how she deals with this conundrum. She is a young woman with a child. Her love for Charles does not obliterate her physical and emotional needs. She loves Loïc and Maxence. She just doesn’t love either of them enough. Compared to the love she feels for Charles, it is untrue love and she is unable to live a life that isn’t true. Her shuttling between things: men, houses, towns, which becomes more extreme as the film progresses, reflects the way she bounces between the reality that she may never find Charles and the need to make a real life, with love, sex and companionship in it, and the opposing reality that love with any man who is not Charles is essentially untrue, and thus unsupportable. When she comes to a decision in the church in Nevers she is, for once, completely still. Within herself she arrives at a decision. Without, she begins a journey towards her arbitrary miracle.”
Tamara Tracz
NL
“Conte d’hiver is een heel intelligente, heel ontroerende film. De beelden zijn vanuit eindeloze verten aan de andere kant van het universum gemaakt; ze dragen de personages niet maar zoeken ze, reiken naar hen zonder ze iets van zichzelf te kunnen geven. De armoedige aandacht van die beelden alleen al is voor de toeschouwer voldoende! De regisseur pakt zijn verhaal niet in, maar laat het kwetsbaar tussen verfrommeld krantenpapier op tafel liggen. Hij filmt niet precies en nadrukkelijk, in allernauwste concentratie, maar op afstand, al fresco: de ‘borstel’ vastgebonden aan een heel lange stok. Hij zet alleen heel grove strepen en trekken neer; met één enkele lijn (één enkel plan) staat de essentie er, zonder de pretentie van het essentiële! De film voegt niets aan de personages toe, maar laat ze bestaan, op zich, in het kader, maar ook los van het kader.”
Dirk Lauwaert
