In the center of the shot, a cream-tone dial-up phone, and all around, a messy girl’s room. The phone ringing is inevitable, the way a gun can’t help but fire, and when Delphine folds herself into the scene to answer, her vacation is thrown into uncertainty again.
The fifth film in Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” series, Le Rayon vert (1986) is the meandering story of a young Parisian secretary struggling to admit her loneliness, to get over her ex-fiancé, and to go on vacation. But not just any vacation—what sets Delphine apart is her insatiable expectation of what a vacation should be, and her constant oscillation between going home early and refusing to stay home because “It’s better to wait for something than to settle for reality.” Dreaming of Antibes, Delphine rejects an invitation to camp with family in Ireland, yet when her ex’s apartment in Antibes is unavailable to borrow, she sorrowfully rejects friends’ suggestions of solutions. She is simultaneously listless and lustful, and, in pursuit of the feeling of vacation, she roams France, visiting Cherbourg, the Alps, Biarritz, and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Striking for its saturated aesthetic—tangible film grain, pastel palettes with bursts of green and red, and endlessly leisurely landscapes––Le Rayon vert is a vacationless vacation that explores an age-old question: to what extent do we create our own fate and to what extent are we resigned to it?
Though fate and futility are both concepts of predetermination, fate is often framed as a way to quell feelings of futility. While futility’s determinism implies an endlessness, or a sense of the too-late, fate’s determinism implies a finality—like vacation, a destination. Le Rayon vert illustrates and evokes the messy relationship between the two; the ways futility and fate are both synonymous and opposite. The ways that when we feel stuck like Delphine, we aspire to a future or fate that deviates from our current feelings, relationships, circumstances, etc; and yet, believing in fate implies that efforts to alter or redirect our destinies are futile.
Since vacations are exercises in intentionality—a decision to splurge, to break away from rhythm and routine, to (re)visit friends, family, and favorite places—their momentary escapism and pursuit of a perfect state of being often serves as a rich subject through which to explore fate and futility, especially since the briefness of vacation makes these themes more tangible. Vacation is a defined timeline—and despite its reputation as a momentary utopia or an escape from the métro-boulot-dodo routine, it also offers a window of clarity: an inexcusable moment to feel our own desires and pursue them, to construct our ideal state. Despite the intensive planning and budgeting often required to go on vacation, vacation is a time where we ironically desire something to happen to us. We plan just enough to put ourselves in ironic positions where we can expect spontaneity and accept chance encounters.
The French have a unique relationship to vacation—it is not so much a luxury as a right, and sometimes a necessity. School breaks every six weeks for two weeks of holiday. For the scorching month of August, Paris empties. Everything closes. The city of love becomes undesirable and limited. Though Delphine’s summer vacation falls in July, Paris becomes not only a lonely place, but a liminal one. While from an American perspective the necessity of vacation can seem overwrought at times, there’s both a personal and cultural weight to it—one friend even implores Delphine, “You can’t just stay in Paris for the rest of your vacation”.
Delphine’s uncertainty on how to approach vacation is relatable to many—the structureless expanse of three weeks can be intimidating, especially when one’s desires and actions are in constant contradiction—for Delphine, her long term desires (to be loved, and to meet someone new who will love her) conflict with her immediate desires for safety and familiarity. Regardless of her general listlessness, Delphine’s lifestyle is regimented by narrow tastes which only make it harder for her to give herself over to the unknown. In addition to the restricted ways in which she is willing to travel, she is vegetarian because she “enjoy[s] eating airy food,” she won’t sail because she gets seasick, and she won’t play on a swing because it makes her nauseous. Each shot of people playing—the camera sweeping across the beach as families toss around a red ball in the waves, or imitating the gaze of someone at the table, intimately hunched over the Scrabble board and inventing silly words—is followed by a shot of Delphine on her own, convinced that walking or kicking solitarily at the waves is “enough.”
Delphine is a superstitious and languid romantic, motivated by the desire for things to happen to her. She takes a lot of long, slow walks. In the streets of Paris, she finds a green-backed playing card and flips it to reveal the queen of spades. Walking to meet friends in the banlieue, Delphine finds a lime-colored poster: “REDISCOVER CONTACT WITH YOURSELF AND OTHERS.” At the garden party, her friends are argumentative and all tough love while they suggest ways she can meet new people—solo travel, group vacations—but Delphine becomes defensive. Delicate ceramics, fruits, and pastries sit in the foreground and laundry hanging out to dry waves gently, framing Delphine. Despite the airy and idyllic garden, Delphine’s emotions waver; the wind picks up, disheveling both her hair and the peaceful setting as Delphine raises her voice and fights the urge to cry (she’ll cry later, tucked away at the edge of the garden).
So the conversation turns to superstition and spirituality, and Delphine declares her belief in “things that just crop up out of nowhere in life”. When questioned on her relationship to traditional superstitions (like cards and stars), Delphine explains, “I believe in personal superstitions. I do believe in things like playing cards you find in the street.” As Rohmer highlights, Delphine believes this is more accurate than astrology because the signs she finds and interprets are more attuned to her daily experiences; if only she can find the signs, then only she can read them, to the effect of a more intimate kind of foreshadowing. The queen of spades, for example, is bad luck and generally symbolizes a widowed woman. Delphine, still mourning the end of her engagement two years ago, reads herself in this card. Furthermore, spades in tarot more generally represent challenging events coming: soon after leaving the card behind her on the curb, Delphine’s ex calls with the news that she cannot borrow his apartment in Antibes for vacation because he’s already planning his vacation on the Riviera.
Cards foreshadow Delphine’s fate later in the film too; however, her most persistent superstition is the power of the color green, each green thing piercing her passive days with significance. She’s aware of passing by green street poles; her friends often wear green beaded necklaces or hair clips on the edge of an apron. Beyond Delphine’s eagle-eye for color, emotional scenes in the film take on a greenness as she defines her principles and particularities. The garden party is framed by ivy and clover; the backyard in Cherbourg is lush with leafy trees and ferns, and in this environment Delphine defends vegetarianism and her ethics of intentional consumption with a clarity she’s rarely shown before.
Though fate is omnipresent, Rohmer reveals it in the same way Delphine believes it to manifest: in brief and unexpected occurrences. Overwhelmed by the overcrowded Alps, Delphine arrives, takes a doleful walk, and impulsively decides to return to Paris, not even staying the night. In her friends’ perspective, this is a critical example of Delphine’s refusal to shape her destiny and experience new things (best case scenario: a lover); her deep-seated belief in fate happening invokes her lonely passivity. From Delphine’s perspective, she can quickly identify a pointless and depressing circumstance. She can sense when a destination isn’t sufficiently romantic, so why bother sticking it out long enough for something to happen to her? It’s this intuition (or perhaps the lack of an affirming sign) that leads her back to the streets of Paris, where she runs into Irène, an old friend she hasn’t seen in perhaps two years. In turn, Delphine’s explanation, “I went away, I came back. I went away and came back again” with “another two weeks to kill,” prompts Irène to lend Delphine her brother-in-law’s apartment in Biarritz. Rather than an intervention of fate, this random interaction is not only acceptable, but inspires Delphine to try another vacation.
Of course, Delphine is lonely in Biarritz too—but she finds momentum there. She is still sad, still cries with little provocation, still runs from flirtatious boys, but the sea-air seems to do some good and she briefly befriends Léna, her exact opposite: an immodest, confident Swedish woman who loves solo-traveling and finding cute boys to take her dancing despite her own engagement. Though Léna is at first a respite from Delphine’s attempt at solo-travel, she eventually runs away from Léna and the flirts they’ve attracted together, and this fit of passion leads her to a trove of omens along the rocky seaside walking paths. First a card, the jack of hearts, a good omen which traditionally signals youthful love, passion and adventure. Unlike the queen of spades, this fortune comes true with less immediacy—but it does usher in good.
Delphine comes across a cluster of adults perched on a sea wall, discussing Jules Verne’s novel, Le Rayon vert. Delphine continues to walk out of sight on the twisting path, but intrigued by the word “vert,” she pauses within earshot of the conversation. A woman describes the novel as “like a fairy tale” (59:48), and Delphine sees herself mirrored by the ways they describe the main character: “The heroine is a fairy-tale heroine. She’s as simple as Cinderella or Snow White.”. Beyond being a romance, which is in and of itself something Delphine is searching for, the little book club describes Verne’s novel as extraordinary because “There are characters who are… who are searching for something.” This line serves to strip away the futility of Delphine’s seemingly endless search for vacation and peace by validating the act of yearning, allowing it to be a heroic action. The group on the sea wall continues to describe the instances they have witnessed the Green Ray, the last ray of light at sunset, miraculously green, and to explain how the phenomenon works—the importance of a clear sky for the light to refract just so: “Some summers you won’t see the green ray at all because the atmospheric conditions are not favorable.” However, when you do! “When you see the green ray, you can read your own feelings. And those of others ”
This scene acts as a glittering flash—a burst of fate—of what Le Rayon vert is all about. It illuminates the ways in which Delphine is searching to clarify her emotions (not that she is merely lost and struggling). The fact that Jules Verne’s character never manages to see the green ray, but does come to understand her own feelings, as well as those of the young man she meets, becomes a reason to hope—for Delphine, hope that she will find a man with whom she feels less lonely, and for the viewer, that she will mature and stick to a decision. The camera cuts away from her revelatory face and the sun dips unassumingly orange below the foggy horizon.
Though her time in Biarritz is insightful, Delphine has not yet achieved a vacation––her sense of futility persists and she decides to spend her last weekend of time off in Paris. In the station, she catches the eye of a young man—a sturdy young cabinetmaker named Jacques. Her idea of romance has always been coincidental—rather than be “proactive” or “determined,” she dreams hazily: “I just like to think that over there, behind a wave, there just might be…” and trails off. Jacques is a romantic guy and not too bold, but perhaps more than his looks, Delphine is initially entranced by the atmosphere of the station. The circumstances under which they lock eyes and blush are just sweet enough.
For the first time in years, Delphine takes a chance. She misses her train home to spend her afternoon with Jacques in a nearby fishing town called Saint-Jean-de-Luz. He is a patient man—and while Delphine’s efforts to explain herself have been full of frustration (such as bemoaning her vacation to friends at the garden party, or explaining her vegetarianism to a family in Cherbourg), Jacques listens. She explains the emptiness that one-night stands inspire in her, and in doing so, she explains what she wants.
Nearby, there is a souvenir shop called Rayon vert.
She leads Jacques to a lookout point, and as they watch the fuzzy horizon of the sea, he asks Delphine if she will spend the next few days with him near Bayonne. Though she doesn’t have to return to work until Monday, and she could easily visit one more town, Delphine refuses to answer until the sun has fully set, hoping that she will witness the green ray and find clarity in that moment—a glimpse of her fate would allow her to realize it and tell him a confident yes or no.
Holding Delphine, who is tense with anticipation, Jacques works to understand her intensity:
Jacques: “Does it bring luck?”
Delphine: “That’s the thing. It helps you to know…”
Jacques: “Know what?”
Delphine: “I’ll tell you later.”
They both sit slightly hunched forward on a bench, their forearms just touching. In these final moments, Rohmer cuts between observing Delphine and allowing the camera to adopt Delphine’s observations. Delphine glances down shyly before continuing to watch the horizon. We see how the sun, orange as an egg yolk now, sinks slowly toward the horizon, before the camera cuts back to a slow zoom on the couple. Jacques’ gaze is focused on Delphine. Though the V in a French deck of cards stands for Valet, Jacques is this foreshadowed Jack, this youthful love.
These alternating shots accelerate, the sun closer and closer to disappearing followed by Delphine and Jacques framed ever-slightly tighter, a warm glow cast by the sun on their faces, the suspense more tangible each time.
For most of her vacation, Delphine waits for signs to indicate that she is on the right track to casually romantic yet fateful encounters. While she waits for life to get better and the next green thing to appear, she drowns in both a sense of futility and a steadfastness to fate. Her horoscope asks, “How can you overcome your typical stubbornness?” and Delphine answers, “I’m not stubborn. Life’s stubborn.” She lashes out against well-meaning advice, “You have to do something, you have to look, blah blah blah,” operates under the assumption and frustration that she is undesirable, and claims that she has already done enough to put herself out there.
Throughout Le Rayon vert, Delphine is an exemplary unreliable narrator, often telling her friends half-truths or versions of stories that contradict each other. (i.e. most glaringly, her friends ascribe her loneliness to her failed engagement, but Delphine alternates between calling Jean-Pierre her boyfriend and admitting their separation, depending on who she is talking to). For most of the film, she’s frustrating to watch. However, by sharing the sunset with Delphine and Jacques, the viewer is assured that what Delphine sees is now real and that her reactions are honest; the combination of these landscape shots and the camera’s quick cuts back to Delphine’s perspective offer affirmations of Delphine’s character, and the prospect of her pursuits being fulfilled is satisfying to watch. Though Delphine is consistently relatable in her meandering, she rarely appears reasonable, and so this moment of assurance deals the viewer both tension and relief.
At last, the camera focuses on the final flicker of the sun and there, a faint green bar flashes along the horizon. Delphine shouts “Yes!” (“Ouais!”) and the camera cuts back to her as she lowers her pointed finger, bringing her hand delicately over her mouth to muffle gasps of joy and awe. The movie cuts back to the dusky, now sunless sky. Instead of the green ray providing her with a concrete answer, Delphine sees it as a sign indicating that she’s on the right track. In effect, her bold yes is more than an answer to Jacques’ invitation—it is a yes to life and a yes to momentum and all that she has been denying herself.