The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

It's summer in Paris. Delphine (Marie Rivière), recently broken up with her boyfriend, is two weeks away from an extended vacation. Suddenly, the phone rings in her office. It's the girlfriend coming on vacation with her, calling to cancel. Delphine doesn't yell, but her tone betrays something beyond irritation. Her co-workers, though, take no heed, and they continue to work inches away from her, not even focused in that purposeful way people are when trying their damnedest not to be caught listening in to an uncomfortable phone call. This is obviously such a minor deal that it's not worth their time.

The rest of the film follows outward from this inconvenience, which is complicated by Delphine's inability to find adequate alternate plans for her summer. With Paris half-empty as everyone takes their vacations, Delphine worries about spending her vacation alone. But friends and family immediately invite her to come along to various vacations in the countryside and abroad. One even discusses an upcoming camping trip that makes her sound like the people Laura lambasted in Claire's Knee, playing on the kindness of landowners by taking over the place for their campouts. With every invitation, however, Delphine begins to invent excuses not to go and continues to say that she'd be all alone, even if she went with a big group. Things are clearly not what they seem, and the alternating desire for and rejection of companionship defines the wandering internal conflict of The Green Ray.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)

Néstor Almendros' natural-lit cinematography casts the Lake Annecy setting of Claire's Knee in summer tones, warm but not too hot, offset by a breeze that practically infuses the frame. The crystal clear water (rigorously maintained by environmental protections), near the base of the Alps that separate this region from Switzerland, has a breathtaking beauty that Almendros presents as the ultimate escape. Yet the great cinematographer also adds a slight but nagging sense of discomfort to this perpetual sunbath, making the cozy warmth of the frame as stifling and dulling as it is revitalizing. Later in the film, the one character mature enough to see outside the sick interweaving of lust and self-justification that occurs on the banks of the lake has the insight to call the place "smothering."

Jerôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), a diplomat engaged to be married, takes an extended vacation in this area to celebrate his last days of bachelorhood. While boating on the lake, he spots Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old friend and possibly flame who lives nearby. Catching up, Aurora remarks her surprise that this womanizer would settle down, but Jerôme maintains he's changed. "I don't look at the ladies anymore," he promises, though like the one-woman moralizing of Jean-Louis Trintignant's protagonist in My Night at Maud's, this proclamation has an air of desperation to it, a verbal talisman being waved about to ward off evil temptation. But Aurora, a novelist whose latest, unfinished story involves a fantastical scenario she invented for a Jerôme-like character, needs to him to stray in order to figure out how to finish her story.