Eric Rohmer's "A Winter's Tale" (1992) is not a credible story for me at all. This is especially so with the heroine Felicie. Rohmer has characters behaving exactly opposite to the way people behave in the Real World yet, even more troubling, he seems to try to convince the viewer that this is, indeed, the way that people really do behave, or at least that it all makes sense somehow.
As someone with a BA/MA in Psychology, my opinion is that the heroine of this story is a mentally ill person. She has been obssessively professing her love for a man with whom she has lost contact five years ago & knew only very briefly anyway, and manipulates and socially abuses two worthy men who express their love for her, in spite of the fact that they both offer her a realistic opportunity for a secure future for both her and her young daughter. What I find even more amazing is that no one in her life suggests that she seek the professional help that she so obviously needs. After my university education, I spent the next 30 years counseling very troubled people, yet I can tell you that I never encountered someone not only as "sick" as this young lady, but who had as little insight into her "sickness" as she did.
The type of deep seated character disorder displayed by our heroine would certainly not have begun with her VERY Brief fling with that now "long lost" lover of five years ago, but would've been evident much earlier, yet nothing of the sort is mentioned. Furthermore, although Felicie does qualify as what some mental health professionals call "the walking wounded" in that she was still able to function in the Real World, there is NO Way that the rest of her life would've been operating as smoothly as portrayed in this film. This is especially so in the bizarre reaction that her two "love interests" Maxence and Loic have to her in spite of the fact that she abuses her relationship with both of them, tells them both that she is still too in love with "long lost" Charles to have a committed relationship with them, and discusses her love for her "long lost" Charles openly with them. In the Real World, any self respecting man would've promptly "kicked her to the curb", yet Rohmer has both of them SO Committed to her that it is SHE who ends her relationship with them.
That the Totally UNREAL ending to this tale has Felicie accidentally run into Charles somewhere in the vast metropolis of Paris, and immediately rekindle their love affair, as if those "missing" five years never even happened is just from OUTER Space for me. From my vantage, Rohmer is trying to show us that the mentally ill behavior of Felicie was not "mentally ill" after all, but some kind of "unconditional faith" that can "make miracles happen". Give Me A Break, OK??? That's SO Far in Outer Space that Hubble can't even see THAT far. The ending is little more than a cheap literary "trick" to attempt to salvage a poorly thought out screenplay.
In his favorable review of this film, Roger Ebert justifies the anti-logic underlying the storyline as typical of Rohmer putting little importance in the storyline of all his films. However, that doesn't "wash" with me because there is a difference between a weak, or even an incoherent story, as opposed the Unreality that I find here. Furthermore, Rohmer makes a poor effort to use this non-logical storyline as a platform for some abstract level of meaning or symbology. True enough, there are plenty of films in the Horror, Science Fiction, and Avant Garde genres that are even more unreal than this film. However, the filmmakers in those films don't make the pitiful and pathetic effort that Rohmer does here in apparently attempting to convince the viewer that Unreality is indeed somehow Real. joseph.kulik.919@gmail.com
