JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

A scene from The Green Ray (1986) and Say Anything (1989)

I’m taking a day off from living in extremely interesting times and pretending that it’s my old, quiet, fairly uneventful life before lockdown.

I’m bored already. Boredom is a state to be desired, free of fear, anxiety, and existential dread—a luxury. I will never complain of boredom again.

Time used to be the luxury, in the days of soul-sucking traffic, frantic multi-tasking, overscheduling, and FOMO. Now time means very little, and if not for this journal I would not know what day it is. Perhaps I will finish listening to the audiobook of Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, which even in the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch required my concentration. Maybe I’ll even dust off my copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which everyone attempted to read in the late 80s.

I do not miss traffic.

According to IMDB, Eric Rohmer made 26 feature films. I have copies of 23 (plus shorts and a documentary), and have been rewatching them in chronological order. I am 15 movies in, and I like them even more now than I did when I watched them because they were required viewing for serious filmgoers. Then again I am no longer the person I was 25 years ago—at least I hope so—and have more life experience to bring to the viewing. Rohmer’s movies have been compared to “watching paint dry,” and that’s not altogether false. Not much happens in them. People yak, yak, and yak some more. They consider their choices very carefully. They articulate their thoughts in detail. Every character is a novel, so each movie is a library—with a café-bar and dancing.

Last night I watched The Green Ray, which stars Marie Riviere. Rohmer often cast the same actors in his movies, and Riviere is in The Aviator’s Wife as the girlfriend who is adamant about maintaining her freedom, in Autumn Tale as the woman who secretly publishes a personal ad for her friend and then vets the respondents, and four other movies. In The Green Ray she plays and speaks for (much of the dialogue was improvised) Delphine, who is kind of a drip.

When her friend bails on her two weeks before their summer vacation, she goes into a tizzy. She cannot travel alone. Friends and family graciously invite her to join them on their holidays, and she is not fun. They serve her porkchops, and she announces belatedly that she doesn’t eat meat and gets all prissy. She wants to meet guys, but when they chat her up she flees. In conversation she defends her contrarian positions heatedly, then bursts into tears. She has no sense of humor. She accepts invitations, then flees back to Paris and mopes because she wants to go away. She finds signs—playing cards lying on the street. She overhears people discussing The Green Ray, a novel by Jules Verne. Someone explains that the green ray is an optical phenomenon—a green light that appears as the sun sets in the horizon.

Delphine reminds me of friends who know what they don’t want, but don’t know what they want—they’ll know it when they see it. Like most of Rohmer’s protagonists—the guy who rejects a beautiful woman because he is faithful to a woman he’s never met, the girl who is dead-set on getting married so she chases a lawyer who runs away from her, the woman who insists on getting her own apartment for weekends so she won’t tire of the boyfriend she shares a house with—she is both admirable for refusing to accept compromise, and annoying for what she puts people through. I understand her better now, and even sympathize, but I won’t be hanging out with her.

In the end she meets someone she likes, but she could just as easily ditch him. They wait for the sign. Suddenly I remembered the ending of Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, which is one of my favorite movie endings. Could it have been inspired by The Green Ray? In Crowe’s movie Lloyd and Diane are on the plane, and she’s terrified of flying. He tells her that take-off is the most dangerous part, so when the “Fasten seatbelts” sign goes off, they’re safe. They stare at the sign, and at the unknown future stretching before them. Ding!