Conte de printemps (1990)'s activity

The first of Eric Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons", A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) presents us with a budding friendship (where other relationships wilt or are dead on the vine) between a philosophy teacher and a mercurial young piano student who tries to throw her new, slightly older friend into her awkward father's arms even though - or specifically because - he's attached to a girl she doesn't like. Though it's spring, and the sense of something new is in the air, the film is thematically more in tune with the entire series, or at least the promise of spring, than the one season itself. Cycles are front and center, relationships are on short loops, and characters move from house to house, dislocated from fixed points. The protagonist, more observer than agent, even condemns notions of delineated space and feels at home nowhere. The dad is fidgety bordering on cringe, but I think his mobile discomfort is part and parcel of the same idea. Even the almost-plot of the lost necklace speaks of transience. So what will survive to last in these newly-formed dynamics? The philosophical underpinnings of Springtime are a little too heady for me to get a good grasp on, and the characters aren't as charming as those of earlier Rohmer film - I might end up just remembering it as that movie where no one knows how to cook properly - but it's not a bad start to a new "cycle" of conversational films.