Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
All-Time Favorites
•
1h 39m
Directed by Éric Rohmer | 99 mins | 1987
Shot quickly in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, this breezy, witty film traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Reinette and Mirabelle (played by Joëlle Miquel and Jessica Forde) become instant friends upon meeting in the first of four vignettes that make up the film (“The Blue Hour”), and in their first two days together, they decide to become roommates in Paris. Throughout the three remaining stories, they encounter many of the inevitable characters of a modern city: the impossible waiter (“The Waiter”), the Metro-station hustler (“The Beggar, the Kleptomaniac and the Hustler”), and the snooty gallery owner (“Selling the Painting”). A Metrograph Pictures release.
“One might easily be watching an unearthed treasure from the early days of the Nouvelle Vague, excitedly witnessing the emergence of a new name in cinema. Amazingly, well into his sixties, Rohmer retains the flexibility to pass from the eye of a tyro to that of an old master within the blink of an eye.”—Tom Milne, from “Amicable confidences,” Sight & Sound, Summer 1988
Up Next in All-Time Favorites
-
Downtown 81
Directed by Edo Bertoglio | 72 mins | 2000
In 1980, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie abou... -
Asako I & II
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | 119 mins | 2018
Between the international breakthrough of 2015’s "Happy Hour" and the sensation that was 2021’s "Drive My Car," Hamaguchi produced this beguiling romance, concerning a young woman and her affairs with, first, a self-dramatizing young drifter, Baku, ... -
La Chinoise
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a...
