Rent A Summer's Tale (1996)

Main Character Energy, Sea Air, and a Well-Deserved Ego Check - A Summer's Tale review by griggs

Give Gaspard a beach, a guitar, and three smart women and he still manages to think he’s the main event. Rohmer lets his little social evasions pile up — the dithering, the self-excuses, the convenient misunderstandings — until his narrative about himself collapses under its own weight.

The film’s Brittany setting (Dinard and that breezy coastline) is so vivid you could treat it as a holiday postcard you can hear and smell. You could drift along on the atmosphere, but the story quietly tightens the screws.

Melvil Poupaud plays the frustrating romantic procrastinator with maddening accuracy, yet the real intelligence lives with Amanda Langlet and Gwenaëlle Simon: alert, funny, and several steps ahead of the man trying to turn them into footnotes. When the ego finally gets punctured, it’s sharp, clean, and deeply satisfying.