A Summer's Tale

The third installment (1996) of Eric Rohmer’s “Tales of the Four Seasons” is set in a resort town on the Brittany coast, where an impassive guitar-strumming lad (Melvil Poupaud) tries to forge relationships with a charming ethnologist (Amanda Langlet of Pauline at the Beach), a music-loving tomboy (Gwenaelle Simon), and a mercurial narcissist (Aurelia Nolin). Their scintillating conversations, set against a sensuous backdrop of sun-dappled beaches and hills, center on love, friendship, and life’s possibilities, and it’s a measure of Rohmer’s art that neither the moral predicaments nor the erotic tensions are ever fully resolved. In French with subtitles.