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A Summer's Tale
Conte d'été
1996 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Éric Rohmer
Awaiting his girlfriend Léna’s arrival at the Breton seaside resort of Dinard, Gaspard befriends — and flirts heavily with — two other women, the companionable ethnology student Margot and the sensual townie Solène, making for a rather complicated situation when Léna finally arrives.
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His conservatism transcends such considerations, though as Brody mentions, could certainly be tied to a certain occidental mystique - which he later obliquely denied.
Paradoxically the films of his which deal most explicitly with sexual mores (Claire's Knee, La Collectionneuse) are those that carry the most regressive lessons: consider them in the context of the free love ideology of the 60s and 70s.
And then of course there is the masterpiece of fidélité, My Night at Maud's.
For me though, more than anything else Rohmer is remembered as the chronicler of bourgeois ennui - certainly there is a political dimension here but it is ambivalent. And even then he always depicted his protagonists with care and love, never as caricutures (The Green Ray is emblematic, few other filmmakers could depict the protagonist as anything but pathetic, not Rohmer though).
For those interested- an earlier review by Brody of a Rohmer film (Summer's Tale) with these words that convey what Brody possibly regards as the root of Rohmer's conservatism: "what emerges is the ironic truth, the confidence that from self-denial, from refusal, from negation, from evasion, from self-effacement, from withdrawal, and from an active self-marginalization, a positive image will ultimately emerge."https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/eric-rohmers-tribute-to-his-younger-self"