This film was made right at the birth of the New Wave, in the same year as Chabrol's second film, the seminal New Wave missile Les Cousins (incidentally Le Signe de Lion was produced by Chabrol),and Truffaut's first big knockout blow, the 400 blows. Godard was only to get his act together in the following year, 1960, with Breathless.

To me this is a masterpiece cut from the same cloth. There are glimpses of mysticism in Rohmer's film The Green Ray, but really this film takes that a lot further, it's a movie that really plays around with chance and fortune. Pierre Wesselrin, of Germano-American origin, is a small-time Parisian composer who has never made a cent out of his music. He talks a lot about having been lucky all his life, and he is, he's fallen in with a crowd of rich friends and he's always bathed in rive gauche society, even though he's not a great talent and is very lazy, he seems to be able to get people to give him money. There's a very Rivettian feel to the start of the movie, Wesselrin throws a party and you have, for example, this guy who is indoors at nighttime wearing dark glasses, he's listening to this febrile, screeching section of some classical music over and over again, repeatedly bringing back the needle of the record player. There's these little throwaway poetical typically French sophistries where they talk allegorically about Venus, and a woman says that no-one lives there because it's too close to the sun, it's good but I'm sure it sounds better in a marijuana haze.

So I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but there ends up being a lot of solitary wandering about Paris. I thought the ultimate poetic vision of Paris was Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us, but this is up there on that level. Rohmer somehow makes Paris feel like a giant coffin, or a kind of Byzantine, encrusted, cemetery.

There's the traditional view of this film which concerns the perils of believing in one's good fortunes, but I think on the whole it's far more mystical, really pointing at Wesslrin's life being ruled by the stars. It's just gorgeous as well. They must have built the walkways along the Seine when people believed in Arcadia, which they don't anymore. The photography just blows me away, favourites being Wesselrin in a floppy hat singing by the Seine, and his violin sonata played at the start of the film as the camera glides over the Seine.

There's a critical idea with this movie about the perils of entrusting your fate to luck. I don't follow that one bit. My reading is that Wesselrin is lucky throughout the movie, in fact his experiences are what enable him to finally finish his violin sonata, and also to appreciate his lucky situation in life. He reminds me of Tartini, a composer who is famous for only one work, The Devil's Trill, a violin sonata which he heard in his dreams (supposedly he saw the Devil playing),and then transcribed upon awaking.

I really felt like screaming after I had finished watching this at quarter to one in the morning, I think I got a few strangled gurgles out, would not have been good to wake the house up. This is why I watch cinema, for the feeling of ecstasy (ec - stasy, literally out of stasis).

A friend pointed out to me that many of Rohmer's later trademarks are present in this film, "the seemingly artless but carefully constructed mise-en-scène". I like to refer to his mise-en-scène as situational, he often does scenes that remind me of the bit in Meshes of the afternoon when a mystical hand lowers a sunflower. It's almost like their are supernatural beings placing objects to be found by the participants in the film.

I've said often enough that the fact that Eric Rohmer (together with Yasujiro Ozu and Jacques Tati) is a film critics' darling is something of a mystery to me. Still, I've persevered and watched 9 films of his so far (I could have sworn they had been less myself!) and I'll probably rent MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S (1969) as well in the near future...

Anyway, since this film came out during that initial burst of creativity which propelled the French Nouvelle Vague movement onto the international stage, I did not wish to miss an opportunity to watch it even if only via an Italian-dubbed version. Indeed, some of its detractors decry the fact that, being Rohmer's first feature-length film and released as it was in between Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS (1959) and Godard's BREATHLESS (1960),the film is tinged more with a predisposition towards cine-verite' (and perhaps mercifully so) than with Rohmer's uniquely sensitive style which he subsequently became renowned for. Having often found his films relentlessly talky and frustratingly mundane, those of his fans which have yet to experience this one (or have perhaps stayed away because of this difference in directorial ideology),I will reassure them by saying that the film's first third was typically Rohmerian. This section, however, was alleviated for me by the surprising (and amusingly silent) appearance of Jean-Luc Godard who plays a party guest (who even seems to come out of nowhere) moodily walking through the living room, smoking a cigarette and forever fiddling with a gramophone! Other notable 'friends' contributing to Rohmer's first feature-length venture are screenwriter Paul Gegauff, producer Claude Chabrol and actress Stephane Audran.

The story deals with an American ex-patriate (Jess Hahn) who apparently inherits a vast sum of money from his dead aunt and consequently celebrates himself into a state of extreme poverty. However, as luck would have it, he had misinterpreted the telegram and all his inheritance effectively went to a distant cousin. The film's lengthy (and mostly silent) middle-section consists of nothing but an increasingly disheveled Hahn walking the streets of Paris, going in and out of telephone boxes and hotel lobbies asking after his "friends" in the hope that they'll lend him a sum of money enough for him to get a roof over his head and a loaf of bread into his belly! While at first I was ready to beg for something to actually happen during this section of the film, in hindsight this was perhaps its highlight and certainly a remarkable sequence coming from Rohmer. Of course, the continuous location shooting was not only required by the film's narrative but must have proved fundamental in keeping the production costs down.

The third and final section, then, sees a reversal of fortune for Hahn's character. After taking up with a clownish tramp (who sarcastically dubs him "The Baron") and performing their routines on the streets to the bourgeois restauranteurs, a journalist friend chances upon him in the gutter one night whereupon he informs him that Hahn's rich cousin has met with a fatal car accident and that he is now effectively a member of high society! As they drive exuberantly off in the journalist's car, Rohmer ends the film by panning to a wonderfully inspired shot of the constellation (presumably to justify the title). Incidentally, I'm of the Sign of Leo myself...

The movie's middle section has a pain and desolation perhaps not seen since in Rohmer's work, as the musician slowly slides into homelessness, poverty and borderline madness. Rohmer, with a perfectly measured tone, captures all the tiny escalating humiliations as he wanders through a largely deserted Paris in the heat. Then the musician takes up with a wandering clown, and the movie takes on a broad comic tone again, not seen since in Rohmer, creating an odd symmetry with the movie s early section, when the musician wrongly thinks he's won an inheritance and parties himself into the state of poverty. That kind of symmetry is emblematic of the movie's weakest element - its unenlightening interest in fate and chance and paths of destiny (inherent in the title, in the deus ex machina ending which finds him inheriting the money after all when his cousin's killed in a freak accident, and in the final shot - after his friends have found him and taken him away to restart his life - which pulls away from the earth to show a heavenly constellation (of Leo, I suppose)). There's little here of the smart conversation and introspection that marks Rohmer's later movies, and what there is verges on parody - the smart set gets to seem pretty trivial and inconsequential against the travails of its protagonist. The sequences of him eyeing food, eavesdropping on snippets of life, trying unsuccessfully to shoplift etc. are utterly stark and simple and moving.