Love without words blossoms rarely in an Éric Rohmer film. When it does, trouble looms. A dumb verbal error dooms the romantic bliss of the couple in his droll and moving “A Tale of Winter” (1992), a restored copy of which begins screening Friday at the Brattle Theatre. Or is it a felix culpa, a lapse that sets up the possibility of an epiphany as exhilarating as that in “The Green Ray” (1986)?
The second in his last cycle of films, “Tales of the Four Seasons,” Rohmer’s 1992 entry fits the somber tone of winter with its meditative mood and religious speculation. But like most of his films, the philosophy emerges from the effervescence of everyday life and the courage and folly of complex, commonplace characters.
The brief, wordless, fun part of Félicie (Charlotte Véry) and Charles’s (Frédéric van den Driessche) romance is swiftly related in a seaside bliss montage that any Hollywood rom-com director might envy. Then the time comes to part, and Félicie writes down her address so Charles, a journeyman cook, can write her later and they can get together and live happily ever after. But in a self-sabotaging Freudian slip, Félicie jots down the right street and number, but the wrong town.
Five years later, only a photo, a memory, and Félicie’s undying love remain from that momentous summer tryst. And Elise (Ava Loraschi), the child Charles has fathered.
Now it is near Christmas and in the midst of the holiday bustle Félicie must choose between two men she doesn’t love. Maxence (Michel Voletti), the hairdresser she works for, is burly and fussy and has, according to Félicie, common sense and “good taste.” And Loïc (Hervé Furic) the librarian, is kind and knowledgeable and those are the very virtues that irk Félicie. Who can stand a guy who is totally smitten, has no backbone, and who in discussions of love pulls a book off the shelf and quotes Plato?
So Félicie picks Maxence, and she and her daughter move in with him when he opens a salon in the provincial town of Nevers. The wallpaper at the new flat is hideous and the bookshelves are empty and ugly. The town itself offers few diversions, chief among them being the shrine housing the crystal-encrypted, incorruptible body of St. Bernadette. Also, the cathedral. When Elise drags her mother into the latter to look at the crèche, the non-religious Félicie has a moment of realization and clarity. Like the lovely, lifeless sleeping beauty Bernadette, she will remain true to her love because no one else on Earth can take his place.
That, as the affably pedantic Loïc points out, is Pascal’s wager: Though the odds are long, you can’t beat the payoff if you bet on heaven. To secularize Félicie’s cathedral revelation, the Catholic Rohmer backs it up with a similar moment during a performance of Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale.” Like that late play by the Bard, this winter romance by Rohmer, then in his 70s, demonstrates that faith and art can work miracles.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.