noralee
One spends a lovely two hours in the French wine country with Eric Rohmer's "Autumn Tale (Conte d'automne)," though this is probably a niche movie for women over 35 - a guy in the back snored through it.This is a delightfully fun movie of character actors with interesting faces having mature conversations about relationships. I've been a Rohmer fan since at least "Claire's Knee" and at age 79 Rohmer uses his camera much more fluidly, though the conversations are no longer like "My Dinner with Andre."All these full-bodied characters have lives and things to do and can't just sit around sipping wine, though they do that too. We are first introduced to the middle-aged characters through their grown kids' disdainful opinions. We get a nice range of relationships, old and young, for comparisons.The climax of the movie is two introductory conversations between two couples and we actually hold our breaths at the outcomes, with one strained by the guy's roving eye and the other a natural coming together of mutual interests.(originally written 7/25/1999)
Franck
I had to stop watching this after 15 minutes. It was SO painful.There are (september 2006) 896 movies in my vote history. "Conte d'Automne" is the only one with a "1" rating...I think I've seen a lot of terrible acting during my life, but these first scenes exposed some of the most ridiculous, dull and laughable acting I've ever seen.The rest? Sets, camera work, direction..? Zero. I mean nothing that any second year cinema student wouldn't be able to achieve in a couple of days.This is the kind of sophomoric, pseudo-intellectual work that gives french cinema a bad name, except for those viewers who are snob enough to forget about what they see and hear, and just praise this kind of crap because it makes them sound like connoisseurs.How this may be seriously considered by some as good cinema is totally beyond me. That's just nonsense. It's like over-boiling cheap noodles, add nothing on it, and serving them while pretending it's great Italian cooking.The same night, I watched "Tandem", another (but good) french movie. The difference in acting, movie-making, imagination, and intelligence was stunning. A relief.
mtalence
Where did Mr Rohmer get the money to make such a terrible movie ? A nightmare, from beginning to end, a nightmare of boredom and pretention. All actors speak "fake" (hearing them is unbearable after 3 minutes), the story is stupid (every basic 1pm telenovela has better plot and twist), there is no direction (south of France looks bad for the first time on screen). What's the purpose of all this ? Who wants to spend 2 hours around these uninteresting depressed french semi-intellectuals ? Not me.
jtur88
I wish I understood French better---I feel that this must have been a masterpiece of comfortable, unforced dialogue. Even the English subtitles left me feeling that these were real people having real conversations. OPne thing that usually turns me off in a film is the sense that a conversation is a forced device of exposition---like Deborah Kerr's soliloquies. Everyone pulled this off very well. They just chatted comfortably through the film, and the audience caught enough of it to follow the story. And a decent enough story it was, with the delights and disappointments very well played through body language.
AD
