Éric Rohmer's Conte d'hiver | A Winter's Tale | A Tale of Winter (1992)

Éric Rohmer's Conte d'hiver is part of his Contes des quatre saisons tetralogy and of course is loosely based on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1623), which iself is based on Robert Greene's romance Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588). Here though, this is a modern take on Shakespeare's play.

Rohmer being more interested in words than plot, there is little action in the film. Félicie (Charlotte Véry) falls in love with Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche) on holiday and leaves him her address so they can contact each other in Paris, but five years later Félice is without Charles but with their four-year-old daughter Élise: she made a slip-up with the address and Charles couldn't give her his address as he was a trainee cook moving around a lot at the time. In between time, Félicie has befriended two men: Maxence (Michel Voletti), a hairdresser, and Loïc (Hervé Furic), a librarian. However, although she loves both men in different ways, she can't commit herself, but she tries: finding Loïc too intellectually crushing, she leaves for Nevers with Élise to join Maxence in his hairdressing salon, although she has a revelation in the cathedral and returns to Maxence only to tell him she's returning to Paris because she can't live with a man she's not fully in love with.

Because this is a Rohmer film there's a deal of talking, particularly philosophical talk, and although Félicie has learned a lot from Loïc she still feels the discussions he has with his friends a little tedious. She has always mentioned her feelings about Charles to both men, and Charles is always the elephant in the room. Félicie believes in coincidence (with or without divine collusion), and is convinced that one day she will find her lover again. During a theatrical production of The Winter's Tale that Loïc takes her to, she has another revelation and breaks into tears when the 'statue' Hermione comes to life: evidently, she sees in this a symbol of Charles being 'reborn'. This is no means the only similarity with Shakespeare's play – such as the existence of Perdita, Leontes's daughter, who also has never met her mother – but the important thing is that Charles is in fact 'resurrected' at Christmas when Félicie meets him on a bus. The great American film critic Robert Ebert claimed Rohmer couldn't make a dud film, and I believe he was right.