For an aggressively desultory summer movie (see below) that works, BAM has picked Eric Rohmer’s delightful 1986 “Le Rayon vert (Summer),” which breezes along chattily and casually, like the best of Rohmer’s tiny French feasts of love, lust and loss. And words, lots of words.
Showing for a short time, “Summer” stars a sad-eyed, celery-thin Marie Rivière as a chronic Debbie Downer, who appears to suffer a metastasizing case of anhedonia while she tries to spend two weeks of unsatisfying vacation about Europe. Her heart is having none of it; nothing clicks, and she repeatedly mopes back to Paris.
But there’s something magical in the rayon vert (green flash) of the title, and our heroine finally finds a cure in the belated company of a simpatico young man. Together, this coltish couple experiences one of those indelible, nail-biting final shots in cinema that everyone talks— no, gasps — about. There’s a little bit of “City Lights” about it, but more hopeful.
Random sidelight: Last night re-watched Albert Brooks’ 1985 comedy “Lost in America,” now streaming on Netflix, and the damn thing didn’t hold up. I was stunned. It’s one of my favorite comedies of the ‘80s. Despite Brooks’ frantic, hand-wringing toggling between desperation, resignation and apoplexy, the movie’s thin, underbaked. The Brooksian moments can be priceless, but even when the streaming went on the fritz during the movie’s last 10 minutes, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything much. The movie sort of fizzled out.
