The Green Ray (1986) film notes for SAM Films

 

The Green Ray (1986) opens in an office with the shades drawn. The phone rings for Delphine (Marie Rivière) with the news that her friend won’t be going with her on vacation. Delphine is distraught. The other secretaries pay little attention. Delphine wants to get out of Paris but doesn’t want to go alone. She lives alone. Vacation is supposed to be a change not only of scenery but with company. Delphine meets up with Manuella (Maria Luisa Garcia) outside on the steps. The sun hurts Delphine’s eyes; she asks to sit in the shade. “Caroline told me last night she’s not going on vacation with me,” Delphine tells Manuella who advises, “go with someone else, you’ll find people, or go alone.” Manuella’s suggestions fall short. Delphine answers, “It’s rough going alone” and “I’m not the adventurous type.” Manuella offers Delphine her grandmother’s house in Spain. “All alone in Spain,” Delphine replies. Delphine’s sister and brother in-law invite her to join them in Ireland. “You’re allowed to camp anywhere. Not like in France,” they tell her. In a backyard garden having lunch with her grandfather Delphine nibbles on a radish. A rose bush climbs the wall. “I started taking vacations very late, because I was a hard worker. When I saw the sea for the first time I was sixty,” he tells her. For him the Seine is as good as the sea. 

Delphine will leave Paris three times. “I hate leaving,” she says in a train station. She comes back to Paris because each place she goes she finds unbearable. In Cherbourg with her friend Françoise’s (Rosette) family, Delphine shocks them by not eating pork. “I will have a tomato since I’m not fond of this,” she says. She won’t eat flowers either; they tease her with ones freshly picked. She won’t eat meat or creatures from the sea, “It’s instinctive, it’s how I feed myself.” She means not just her belly but also her conscience. She is removed from people because what moves her is not what moves them. The group in Cherbourg wear buttoned up shirts with sweaters. Suntanned, they go boating. Delphine declines, worried she’ll get seasick. The group gets along because they are more or less the same. A film about them won’t be made. A blonde woman tells Delphine, “you are a plant.” Delphine walks to the edge of a field and comes upon a gate. She takes another path, presses a flower to her face, and again comes to a gate. She bursts into tears. The wind blows in the trees.

August 1st in Biarritz, Delphine wades with sunbathers into the sea. Women go topless as do men. Delphine is in a one piece. She lies on her towel as people walk by on their way. The waves become rough. Bathers return to the beach. Delphine eats dinner sitting on a guest bed. She puts away the family portraits of her friend Irene and pulls a book off the shelf. In Biarritz she overhears a conversation about “The Green Ray” by Jules Verne. Three older women and one man sit on a rock wall near the sea. A woman in a lavender sweater says, “It seemed to me a kind of fairy tale. The heroine is a kind of fairy tale heroine. She’s as simple as Cinderella or Snow White.” Delphine sits behind them listening. A woman wearing glasses says, “I found ‘The Green Ray’ extraordinary because it’s a love story, a romance, with characters who are searching for something.” Delphine listens as though she is who they are describing. A woman with grey hair brushed back recalls seeing the green ray with her father when she was a child, “When the sun set on the horizon at the final stage there was a kind of pale green shaft, like a sword blade, a horizontal beam, very pretty but extremely brief.” The woman in lavender adds, “Jules Verne says, that when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others too. That’s what happened to this heroine who never sees the green ray but finally reads her own feelings.” Delphine who worried about being on vacation alone, is alone on vacation. Her actions are not dictated by her fears. She is braver than she believes.

In Biarritz Delphine meets a Swedish girl who plans to travel on to Spain. Lena (Carita Holmström) is a good conversationalist; any remark thrown at her, she throws one back. She walks the beach topless. She finds Delphine’s one piece puzzling. That’s no way to get a tan. Lena is Delphine’s opposite. She doesn’t trust people. “I play with people,” she tells Delphine. She banishes sadness by seeking fun. They are two women traveling alone. They attract two men to their table. This doesn’t last long. The more Lena speaks, Delphine retreats. Delphine stands up quickly and leaves. 

Delphine reads “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky in the Biarritz train station. A young man in a black shirt and jeans sits beside her. He’s a cabinetmaker on his way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. “I’m a secretary. Not very exciting,” she tells him. They sit for a few moments in silence. Delphine told Lena in Biarritz that, “my ideal is romantic.” Delphine wants someone who is there for her, not there to satisfy himself. In her 1980 book “The Traveling Woman” Dena Kaye daughter of the actor Danny Kaye gave advice for traveling alone, “But it’s your basic attitude toward the trip that gives you the emotional ballast to handle such moments. A moment is just that, a moment. It passes with time. Whatever the situation, it’s important to see the humor rather than the drama, to watch your own reactions and learn how to pull yourself up. That too is part of the journey.” This too is romantic. Is something you learn by being out in the world on your own. Delphine sees the green ray in the coastal city Saint-Jean-de-Luz at the end of her summer vacation. She isn’t alone. The experience that had so moved the women she had overheard, Delphine also experiences. She cries out looking at the horizon.