From one angle, Eric Rohmer’s late-career masterpiece is a luminous Christian parable about the transformative effects of grace; from another, it’s a frightening, unresolved picture of the role that chance plays in human affairs. One summer, a young man and woman (Frédéric van den Driessche and Charlotte Véry) fall deeply, passionately in love. Five years later, after accidentally giving him a false address, she is raising his child and drifting back and forth between two infatuated men with whom she’s unwilling, or unable, to settle down. A Tale of Winter—which includes a generous excerpt of the play from which it takes its name—is the fullest expression of Rohmer’s career-long reckoning with Shakespeare, the most sophisticated of his many attempts to pin down the nature of faith, and one of his most graceful, mysterious, and emotionally overwhelming films.
