Word: vaines
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...reader first meets Peter as he returns after several years' absence to the New England village of Rocky Port to spend the summer with his twice-divorced mother. It is 1964. The village, which seems hard by Stonington, Conn., where Mary McCarthy once lived, is much changed. In vain his mother, who believes in old-fashioned cookery, harangues local grocers for tapioca and fresh fish; she also scours local shops for real jelly glasses. She regards the changes only as part of a dreadful decline in traditional American virtues. What his mother mourns, Peter misses too. But he suspects...
...film is, of course, not simple-minded. Jerome's behavior could probably be traced to Montaigne: "Vain glory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The latter leads us to thrust our nose into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved...
...other Rohmer stories, the protagonist is an amiably vain, self-righteous prig torn by his infatuation with two women. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is a dandified Paris antique dealer who decides to take a vacation from his mistress. His holiday goal at a friend's villa near St.-Tropez, he announces, is "to do and to be absolutely nothing." Unfortunately for his purposes, the villa is already occupied by a painter friend and by Haydee (Haydée Politoff), a pouty, bikini-clad young swinger who collects men much the way Adrien gathers antiquities. Her affairs with the painter...
Bresson is deliberately raising false expectations, testing a dramatic sense he has not the slightest intention of satisfying. He presents all the stock types of sentimentalized romance: the poor farm girl, wealthy lover, evil rival. But he reverses anticipated results. Chastity is a vain ideal; honesty goes unrewarded; villainy is not punished...
What Bresson is doing with all of this-the frustration of expectation, the off-center perspective, and the naturalism-is measuring the distance between vain idealization and reality. He triggers stock emotional responses and then demonstrates their misapplication. He poses sentimentality only to refute it. He is consciously near-missing the idyllic, falling back to the real...