Like all Rohmer's films I've seen, this one is "just" a story, told as by a storyteller, without any of the visual cinematic items that usually make of a film a "movie". The only "special effects", here, are visual, and consist of beautiful women...
So, it's the story that I will comment on.
For me, the story is the genesis of an avalanche, the explanation of how you can get from A to Z, where Z is so far away from A that you really need to pass through all the intermediate steps: an avalanche that gains, slowly, speed, as you move gently from A to B, C, D, and than, a little more unexpectedly, to E, F, G. down to all the furthest and most extreme letters of the alphabet.
No, not the Z, though.
It is extremely difficult to imagine how, or why, a happy man, with one child and another coming, and a beautiful wife, would want to make pregnant an old friend of his, who has no intention - or so she says - of having a lasting or meaningful relationship with him.
Here the intermediate letters of the alphabet consist of the reappearance of an old friend, of a mild crisis of a man who was accustomed and able to choose beautiful women and that now "only" has his wife, of a sort of boredom that appears in his empty (although business-filled) afternoons, and of course of the challenge that all this comports. Step by step, although improbable, he is taken almost down to the most extreme consequence, until he remembers of being a proud father, in the most beautifully (and perhaps only) cinematic act of the film, while he pulls out his jumper, and by doing so he remembers of a playful day at home. Yes, home, that sacred thing that he manages, finally, to save and preserve from that avalanche that ran over his afternoons.
Marco
So, it's the story that I will comment on.
For me, the story is the genesis of an avalanche, the explanation of how you can get from A to Z, where Z is so far away from A that you really need to pass through all the intermediate steps: an avalanche that gains, slowly, speed, as you move gently from A to B, C, D, and than, a little more unexpectedly, to E, F, G. down to all the furthest and most extreme letters of the alphabet.
No, not the Z, though.
It is extremely difficult to imagine how, or why, a happy man, with one child and another coming, and a beautiful wife, would want to make pregnant an old friend of his, who has no intention - or so she says - of having a lasting or meaningful relationship with him.
Here the intermediate letters of the alphabet consist of the reappearance of an old friend, of a mild crisis of a man who was accustomed and able to choose beautiful women and that now "only" has his wife, of a sort of boredom that appears in his empty (although business-filled) afternoons, and of course of the challenge that all this comports. Step by step, although improbable, he is taken almost down to the most extreme consequence, until he remembers of being a proud father, in the most beautifully (and perhaps only) cinematic act of the film, while he pulls out his jumper, and by doing so he remembers of a playful day at home. Yes, home, that sacred thing that he manages, finally, to save and preserve from that avalanche that ran over his afternoons.
Marco