A Tale of Winter

Paris is prosaic in winter; one has to provide one’s own transcendent metaphors. For Félicie (Charlotte Véry), the sidewalks, buses, and Métro are only potential meeting places for her lost love Charles, to whom she gave a wrong address in a ditzy slip years ago, then had his child. Now she vacillates, seemingly impetuously, between two perfectly opposite suitors—a beauty shop owner and a Catholic intellectual. Pascal, Plato, and Victor Hugo (author and ubiquitous street name) incongruously appear to guide this decidedly unintellectual heroine whose bedrock spirituality has only to do with hope, the absurdity of which is its own justification. Bresson, Hitchcock, and Shakespeare appear to have guided the filmmaker. As in White Nights, Vertigo, and The Winter’s Tale, “People who were thought dead are resurrected.”