4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle

Eric Rohmer - New 35mm print

4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Written and Directed by Eric Rohmer

A Production of Les Films du Losange, 1987, 1:33

STARRING

Joëlle Miquel as Reinette
Jessica Forde as Mirabelle
AND WITH
Philippe Laudenbach, Béatrice Romand,
Marie Rivière & Fabrice Luchini

Over the course of four episodes, two young women – one from the city, the other from the country – meet and bond over an exquisite atmospheric event ('The Blue Hour'), and then room together in Paris, where they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city: the impossible waiter ('The Waiter'), the metro station hustler ('The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler'), and the snooty gallery owner ('Selling the Painting').

“Four Adventures was made “while waiting to finish his masterpiece Le Rayon Vert. And guess what – it’s just as great.”

— Time Out New York

“A perfect example of Rohmer’s emphasis on people talking, relating and living... his multiple story film – one of his most charming – describes the Aesop’s Fable-style friendship of two young women. The simpliest incident becomes the most momentous occasion... belongs to that epiphanal period following Le Rayon Vert.”

— Armond White, New York Press

“This movie’s first chapter, “The Blue Hour,” finds the sleepy girls waiting for that moment of complete silence just before daybreak. Blink and you’ll miss it, rustle and you’ll break the spell.”

— Rita Kempley, Washington Post

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This quartet of breezy comic and dramatic sketches by Eric Rohmer, from 1987, finds the ironic filmmaker pursuing vast matters with casual means. The young women of the title—Reinette (Joëlle Miquel), the country mouse, a talented self-taught artist preparing to study in Paris, and Mirabelle (Jessica Forde), the city mouse, a Paris ethnology student on a rustic summer vacation—bond in a magical instant of natural wonder and decide to room together in the capital. There, Reinette (whose paintings are actually Miquel’s) lets her talent ripen as her principles are challenged by urbanites’ brazen wiles, and Mirabelle puts her own hardened cleverness to work for her gifted but vulnerable friend. The heart of the story is the birth of art from hidden, humble, nature-inspired powers and its development by—and enrichment of—the rough-and-tumble city. Reinette’s passage from idealism to practicality, from surrealism to realism, parallels Rohmer’s own; the movie’s incipient two-woman New Wave suggests that it takes a roiling crowd to capture and nurture silence and solitude. Co-starring Philippe Laudenbach, as a cantankerous waiter; Fabrice Luchini, as an archly jargonizing art dealer; Marie Rivière, as a well-dressed cadger; and the real-life Housseau family, who are farmers.

– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

DVD/VOD from Kimstim