Autumn Tale is, in my opinion, Rohmer’s most commercial and accessible film. It’s strange therefore that it is one of the only films of his that never made it to Region 1 DVD, which means that my readers in the United States are not going to be able to act on this very positive review of the film unless they still have a VHS player and an old tube TV gathering dust in the basement.

Autumn Tale is a wonderfully enjoyable story about the psychology of people who are just beginning to realize that they are entering the autumn of their lives – basically, they go a little bit crazy! The story centers around Béatrice Romand, who plays a divorced middle-aged woman who owns a vineyard, and her meddlesome friend (Marie Rivière) who decides to take Romand’s love life into her own hands. The supporting cast covers all the usual Rohmer types: sensitive, articulate men; laconic, big-haired studs; adorable-but-maddening women with overdriven brains, and so on. And the resulting mixture is as joyous and captivating as one would expect from any Rohmer film.

Autumn Tale may lack some of the depth of his greatest films, but it also has a delightful element of light comedy that one usually does not associate with Rohmer. The dialog would be classified “light and accessible” by Rohmer’s standards, but it is still pretty intense by American standards. Character development is lovely, and the classic Rohmeresque character interaction and layering of human emotion is on full display, most poinently in that both women who are trying to give away men in the story are unconsciously in love with the men they are trying to give away.

I should add that Autumn Tale is also a wonderful “wine film.” Not only is the wine talk interesting, but the wine subplot elegantly echos the central story of middle-aged people in the Rhône valley seeking love (can Côtes du Rhône age well?!) Further, the story is written so that wine helps delineate the various relationships – all the properly functioning human relationships in the film involve wine or the idea of wine, and the non-functioning ones do not. It sounds corny, when you just blurt it out like that, but to see how gracefully Rohmer pulls this off is to begin to understand just how far and to what heights he pushed the art of film making. I make no excuses for being an unabashed Rohmer fanatic – he’s my kind of filmmaker.

I don’t know how you should go about seeing Autumn Tale, but if you should get the opportunity somehow, don’t miss it. Be sure to watch to the very end of the credits, for you only learn the truth about Marie Rivière’s innermost feelings in the final seconds.