Pauline at the Beach

Masters

"A breezy, casually profound farce"

The AV Club
  • Archive - Festival 36
  • Director: Éric Rohmer
  • France 1983
  • 95 minutes
  • French
  • Subtitles in Hebrew

Marion is a young, beautiful and successful fashion designer from Paris. Recently divorced, she decides to spend the end of summer in the family beach house on the Normandy coast and invites her 15-year-old cousin Pauline to come along. At the beach, Pauline watches the complicated flirtations of her elders while making the acquaintance of a boy named Sylvain…

Pauline at the Beach is the third of Éric Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs." The effortlessly witty film is a comedy of romantic manners that bears overtones of Henry James. Rohmer strips the French bedroom farce down to its essentials and presents a cerebral and sensual film that sings the praises of youthful candor.

Restored Digital Copy

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Éric Rohmer 1920-2010

The Haifa Festival celebrates a centennial to the birth of Éric Rohmer and a decade to his passing with a tribute of seven of his films in restored digital copies.

Éric Rohmer was born as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer in 1920 in Tulle. He assumed the nom de plume - inspired by Erich von Stroheim and pulp novelist Sax Rohmer - for personal reasons, his mother was led to believe that Maurice was a teacher, and she died in 1970 unaware that he did anything else. Rohmer did teach school for a short time and began his writing career in the mid-1940s (he published the 1946 novel Elisabeth under another nom de plume, Gilles Cordier).

After moving to Paris, he started to write film criticism for French periodicals and was a founding editor of La Gazette du cinéma in 1950, along with François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, and became editor in chief of the New Wave publication Cahiers du cinéma in 1957. That year he and Claude Chabrol authored the film study Hitchcock. In 1963 he quit Cahiers after becoming involved in a dispute.

Unlike his New Wave contemporaries, Rohmer’s debut film, The Sign of Leo (1959) failed and he would have to wait a decade for his first international and critical success, My Night at Maud.

Rohmer is renowned for the three film series he produced between 1963 and 1998. The stories in Six Moral Tales - Rohmer’s first series - were inspired by Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and focused on “a man meeting a woman at the very moment when he is about to commit himself to someone else”. The realization that obsession can replace reality underpinned his second series, the Comedies and Proverbs sextet. And then came the quartet Tales of the Four Seasons. All three series are represented in the tribute.

“Éric Rohmer is the romantic philosopher of the French New Wave, the director whose characters make love with words as well as flesh. They are open to sudden flashes of passion, they become infatuated at first sight, but then they descend into doubt and analysis, talking intensely about what it all means” - Roger Ebert.

Éric Rohmer won numerous awards for his films, including the Golden Lion for Best Film and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Festival, the Louis Delluc Prize, the David di Donatello Luchino Visconti Award and Academy Award nominations.


  • Director Éric Rohmer
  • Production Margaret Ménégoz
  • Script Éric Rohmer
  • Cinematography Nestor Almendros
  • Editing Cécile Decugis
  • Festivals Berlin 1983 (Best Director, Fipreci Prize, OCIC Award - Honorable Mention)
  • Actors Amanda Langlet, Arielle Dombasle, Pascal Greggory, Feodor Atkine
  • Source Les Films du Losange, Paris