With this, the seventy-nine-year-old Eric Rohmer completes a cycle of four films begun a decade before, "Tales of the Four Seasons." What sets it apart from other Rohmers, what gets you to straighten up in your seat, is the greater generational mix in the cast of characters. There are still, as is his habit (filthy or not), the slender young lovelies: one of them is actively planning her wedding, and another of them has cooled off in her relationship with a middle-aged philosophy professor, wants him only as a "friend," but cannot accept him as that until he has a permanent new girlfriend. With that in mind, but with a few loose screws in mind as well, she conspires to set him up with the mother of her casual new boyfriend(!), an impressively independent widow too busy in her vineyard to have any time to play the dating game. She is, from every angle, the film's central character. Her lifelong best friend -- the contentedly married mother of the young woman currently planning her wedding -- has her own matchmaking scheme for the vintner, no less screwy, founded as it is on an unauthorized Cyrano-esque ad in the Personals. What warrants special emphasis in all this is that the character of the professor, while still a generation younger than Rohmer, permits the filmmaker to address directly his besetting obsession. ("I'm not hooked on young girls," the man protests, but his prospective blind date has her own experience in these matters: "Men who like young girls do it all their lives.") And the winemaking motif permits him a metaphorical approach to the contrasting concept of "aging," and more precisely, "aging well." The point is underlined, at least for viewers who go way back with Rohmer, by casting in the role of the vintner the indelible Béatrice Romand, who was introduced as a mere slip of a teenager in Claire's Knee, and who has appeared in a handful of other Rohmers, ever more marginally, over the years. For good measure, the part of the best friend is played by Marie Rivière, who first appeared in a Rohmer, if not quite so youthfully nor quite so indelibly, twenty years past. These actresses and their present roles have nudged Rohmer towards an admission he has seemed reluctant to make: that people do grow old. And they still have lives to live. (Autumn is the fitting season to turn one's thoughts this direction.) Romand, let it be noted, is still a slender thing, still looks great in jeans, still has that winsome way of pursing her lips, still has that great tangled bush atop her head, buffeted by the breezes of the Rhône Valley. But she is not still a young thing. She has aged -- well. Rohmer, so it would appear, has not stopped growing either. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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