Jarrett Fuller

I’ve been posting a lot about books lately so let’s talk movies for a second. Last month I watched Eric Rohmer’s Tales of Four Seasons, a quartet of films, each based around a season, for the first time. Rohmer is a new director to me, but one I’ve wanted to watch for a while. Turns out, he makes exactly the kind of movies I love: slow, conversation-heavy films featuring aimless, overeducated and intellectual young people. His movies are filled with professors and academics, philosophers and students, and the dialogue is laced with references to culture. (I hate to say it now but this is what attracted me to Woody Allen films when I was in high school.) I’ve found myself thinking back to images from these movies a lot since I watched them.

Even though each film is, nominally, about a season, I found all of them to be perfect summer films. So much of the series takes place outdoors, in beautiful gardens and landscapes. Perhaps because I’m spending my days in my garden, I found my eyes wandering to the backgrounds, the landscapes, the plants. There were multiple frames I had to pause and marvel, thinking “This is what I want my garden to look like.”