What could be more egocentric than wanting from the sensation of another person the full throttle of desire, passion, and every shade of transcendent experience? And what could be more ridiculous, more naïve, more dreamy-eyed, and more shamelessly hopeful? And what more human? Around this and its associated myths Pauline at the Beach revolves like a frozen planet, setting its face to this and that side of the question without becoming too committed to any one point.
The steely core of this human madness of a planet is the titular character, Pauline, who takes part in the fateful—and fatal—adult game of love as an initiate of this dangerous word and its consequences, this loaded and deadly concept that seems to control the minds of those hoping to experience its glow and its glamour. She is also the film’s moral center—she never shares the weight of the lies told by the characters to each other and to themselves, but coolly observes and questions, remaining calm and level-headed even as she undergoes her own heartbreak. This is her role: a buoy in the storm, bobbing among the disparate and foundering ships on a sea of love. But perhaps it’s more like a mud pit.
While the cast of characters is notable for their various attitudes toward love, more notable still are the similarities between their attitudes: Marion is a lovesick—and love-prone—woman carried away by both her attachment to her lover and her silly rationalization of this passion—although she does have some moments of honest lucidity; Pierre is just as lovesick as the woman who doesn’t love him, one whose love is unrequited but who cleaves to his love all the same; Henri is clearly a lecherous rogue whose love is more theoretical and detached than that of the others, but remains firmly within the game of passion and deceit played by all; and Sylvain is the young up-and-comer, somewhat reticent and overtaken, who experiences some of this deceit and starts to generate his own orbit of jealousy and disgust.
That leaves us with Pauline—the moral center. She is the only one of this motley francophone paradise that sets aside all her prejudices—perhaps because she is too young and green to have many—and allows herself to experience this so-called love for the first time. And what happens? She becomes disenchanted with it all, despite knowing for certain in the last scene what Marion suggests as a possibility (warped as she is by her own involvement in the game); she has had her first taste of the seductive dangers of love and its correlates: self-delusion, deceit, egotism, and what often feels like a desperate self-interest.
Closest to the outsider who looks at this untidy roundelay, Pauline represents the level-headed skepticism about this whole love thing. And her disappointment in the end, in spite of knowing what her cousin doesn’t, reflects with the sound serendipity of this achievement of Éric Rohmer’s that love and loving—at least as these people have been doing it—might be innately unsatisfying and insatiable to boot. The final impression of Pauline at the Beach is like a heavy fog in the middle of spring. Things should be fine but they’re not. Something is very wrong indeed.
