Conte d'automne
| Autumn Tale | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Éric Rohmer |
| Written by | Éric Rohmer |
| Starring |
Béatrice Romand Marie Rivière Alain Libolt Alexia Portal |
| Cinematography | Diane Baratier |
| Edited by | Mary Stephen |
| Distributed by | October Films (USA) |
|
Release date
|
September 23, 1998 (France, Belgium) July 1999 (USA) |
|
Running time
|
112 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $2.8 million |
| Box office | $2.2 million |
Autumn Tale (French: Conte d'automne) is a 1998 French film, directed by Éric Rohmer, starring Béatrice Romand, Marie Rivière, Alain Libolt, Didier Sandre, Alexia Portal, and Aurélia Alcaïs. It is the final film of Rohmer's Contes des quatre saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons), which also includes A Tale of Springtime (1990), A Tale of Winter (1992) and A Summer's Tale (1996).
Magali (Béatrice Romand), forty-something, is a winemaker and a widow: she loves her work but feels lonely. Her friends Rosine (Alexia Portal) and Isabelle (Marie Rivière) both want secretly to find a husband for Magali.
Sight & Sound called it a "beautiful, witty and serene film" which "never falls into the talking-heads trap. Encounters in cars, cafés, gardens and restaurants are visually dramatised, allowing the characters' philosophies (the action of the film, as it were) to be expressed dynamically. And this literary emphasis on language, something of a cliché with Rohmer, and the simplicity of the mise en scène rest on tight plotting in the tradition of Rohmer's master, Hitchcock."
Stephen Holden, in excerpts re-published after the film's New York City opening but originally written after the film's appearance as part of the 1998 New York Film Festival, called the film "as sublimely warming an experience as the autumn sun that shines benevolently on the vineyard owned by the film's central character, Magali (Beatrice Romand)"; although the film has its "labored moments" and "except for a twist here and there, you know where the story is going to go", the film nevertheless "evokes such a sensuous atmosphere — bird song, wind and light and shadow that delineate the season and time of day with an astonishing precision — that you are all but transported into Magali's fields, where this year's grapes promise to yield an especially fine vintage."
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Wikipedia