Near Orouët

New Restoration “Rozier casts the minutiae of daily life as cosmic playthings of destiny and invests them with an extraordinary, bittersweet romantic energy … With his blend of delicate understatement and raucous spontaneity, he may be the most secretly influential director of the era.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker Often introduced as a ​“forgotten” member of the French New Wave, Jacques Rozier (1926–2023) only made five feature films, each of them willfully disobedient to the standards of contemporary success. In what increasingly looks like his masterpiece, he is a painter of sunset beauty and mystery, a quick improviser of comedy, and a patient modernist documenting the near-frictionless sensation of vacation time. The title evokes Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, in which the path taken creates a scale of time unto itself, and with it an experience of the world. In Rozier’s film, three young women flee their secretarial jobs for a belated, extended summer trip. The film’s chapters—a forward-moving plot, or a retrospective diary—remind one of Rohmer, while the trio is as playful as the duo in Rivette’s Celine and Julie. The fleeting undertow of emotion and chance encounter, never externalized into proverb or elevated into myth but appreciated for its own sake, is Rozier’s unique mark. In French with English subtitles “Rozier’s cinema always appears to us as an eternal renewal … The film’s rhythm—with its surges of momentum, its stalling, its abrupt rebounds, its apparent returns to square one—contributes to the impression that Du côté d’Orouët is self-evident, caught on the spot, and natural.” Joël Magny, Cahiers du cinéma