4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Starring
Joëlle Miquel as Reinette
Jessica Forde as Mirabelle
And with
Philippe Laudenbach, Béatrice
Romand,
Marie Rivière & Fabrice Luchini
Written and Directed by Eric Rohmer
A Production of Les Films du Losange, 1987,
1:33
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
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
