The career of Eric Rohmer is filled with one exquisite masterwork after another. But for a wine lover, Autumn Tale (Conte d’automne, 1989) is perhaps the essential film: a delicate romantic comedy about middle age, it is set among the vineyards and farms of the Rhone valley: Here are people for whom wine is the beginning of many a conversation, many a deliberation and even many a relationship. The same might be argued of Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, one of his most enjoyable late comedies precisely because it’s so close to Rohmer in its calm, somewhat detached analysis of love’s adventures and mistakes: There is a great deal of wine drunk in that movie as a prelude to lovemaking, but for the most part it’s a matter of American girls getting drunk and losing their inhibitions to dazzlingly erotic Spaniards. I don’t think Allen himself gives a hoot about what anyone is drinking.
Autumn’s romance, which blossoms only late in the film, begins a with a glass of 1989 Cote du Rhone drunk at a wedding: a businessman, well north of 40, samples a wine. Eagerly beside him stands the vigneron herself, Magali (Béatrice Romand)—she’s a middle-aged widow and, as is so often the case in Rohmer, not only prickly but indefatigably, combatively articulate. The gentleman, Gérald (Alain Libolt, who looks like a more elegant, sensitive Bob Dole), tells her it’s aging very nicely, and compares it favorably to a Gigondas he had with lunch the day before. Magali is elated. This is a triumph: We’ve already learned that, as a woman who practices principles that are essentially biodynamic, Magali plants a low yield, doesn’t use pesticides and doesn’t weed between the rows in her fields. As a result her fields are a bit of a mess, like her great windblown crown of dark hair. Her refusal to weed, she tells her friend Isabelle (Marie Rivière), has earned her the ridicule of her neighbors, but she doesn’t care. Well, we know this is mere bravado. She may also pretend that she’s indifferent to having a lover, but she cries to Isabelle about her loneliness and the burden of running the place alone.
This encounter at the wedding, in fact, is Isabelle’s doing. Isabelle has found Gérald—the son of a vigneron, incidentally—for Magali. Isabelle, who is married, took out a personals ad—but, this being Rohmer, she has allowed a small, reckless bit of guile to worm its way into her generous impulse. She initially pretends to be Magali—to protect her, she finally confesses to Gérald—yet she seems to enjoy lightly flirting with him at leisurely lunches in the local towns.
These sort of devices, which could be played very broadly, with Rohmer unfold with a Mozartean clarity: Happiness is usually, ultimately arrived at in movies like Autumn (it’s one of four with a seasonal theme), but the film is not about the contrivances that drive its leisurely narrative. It’s about how Rohmer’s characters use (or misuse) their often overfine philosophical and moral intelligences to reach their ends. And, unlike Vicki Christina, wine never muddles anyone’s thinking. You get the sense, rather, that an opened bottle stimulates the intense deliberations of these characters.
The film ends with a party celebrating Magali’s harvest—her concerns about her crop nearly kept her from attending the wedding—and if you follow this final scene all the way through the credits, you’ll see a wonderfully revealing moment—just a somewhat bemused but genuinely regretful glance—that reveals Isabelle’s true feelings.
Rohmer is too subtle an artist to dwell on the metaphor of the vineyard, of the growing and gathering in of a life, but it’s there, anyway. Magali’s vineyard has a beautiful, simple richness, shot often in the high sunlight of afternoon rather than the prettifying gold of late day: The air is full of insects, but also the buzz of planes and cars. Not too far off, the monumental shapes of the Tricastin nuclear towers are unavoidable monuments on the horizon. In Rohmer’s eyes they are not necessarily hideous— Gérald, we learn, is fond of industrial architectute: They are just there, the work of man amid the word of nature.
