'The Green Ray' and Reading Week Despair
As the long-awaited escape of Reading Week approaches, so too does the inevitable onslaught of questions: “What are your plans?”; “Where are you going?”; “Who are you going with?” In a week without classes, everyone has to go somewhere: London, Copenhagen, Sri Lanka; the destination means less than participating in the mass exodus itself. Whilst the possibilities are theoretically as endless as your funds allow, finding where and who to travel with can quickly become a stressful affair, underpinned by the looming fear of being the only one to stay in town. As anyone who has stayed for a holiday week can tell you, the town hollows out quickly, leaving one to wander down Market Street like Will Smith in I Am Legend — the lone survivor of some catastrophic event. It seems there’s no choice but to get out.
Such is equally the dilemma facing Delphine, the protagonist of Eric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray. Two weeks before her summer holiday, her friend bails on their plans for Greece, leaving Delphine unmoored with nowhere to go and no one to go with, as her other friends have already settled on their trips. They encourage her to travel alone but she declines, having not enjoyed solo travel in the past and feeling an acute sense of loneliness after a break-up. Lost in emotional purgatory, Delphine travels from place to place but can never bear to stay too long, only finding more discontent with each location.

Without any heavy-handed gestures or attempts at social satire, Delphine’s conversations and inner turmoil displays the absurdity in our mutual obsession with getting away. She declines to join her family in Ireland, wanting a real holiday somewhere warm, but feels no different when she finally reaches the sun and sea. When she returns to Paris a second time, ready to submit defeat, a friend tells her, “You can’t just stay in Paris for the rest of your vacation.” Delphine accepts this falsehood as she keeps participating in the ritual of holiday without gaining anything from it.
The movie’s title comes from a Jules Verne novel of the same name where the story is different but shares a metaphorical premise. The green ray, as the film’s characters explain, is a rare moment at sunset when, under the right conditions, the sun momentarily appears green as it falls below the horizon — a moment when Verne says one can magically read one’s feelings and the feelings of others. It’s this rare instance of magic that Delphine searches for, but which isn’t waiting for her upon arrival somewhere new.
Delphine’s trap is not uncommon in St Andrews: to feel a social obligation to go somewhere and do something, and to equally invest fictional magic into new places and new experiences to solve all of one’s doubts and anxieties. And whilst it’s tempting to leave for the sake of leaving, the week granted in the calendar isn’t always the right week to get away. For Delphine, a new outward space cannot offer her any more inner clarity, and the need to find a place to go merely becomes a stressful distraction from herself.
Despite all this, Rohmer’s camera seems to constantly contradict Delphine’s ennui, finding astounding beauty in the most ordinary of details: a fence, a facade, and the effects of sunlight through leaves in a garden. The film is bathed in warm sunlight and the vibrant colours of summer, displaying beauty all around Delphine if she’ll only find the peace of mind to admire it. And whilst the warmth of summer is far from our shores, even a hollowed-out St Andrews finds that same charm. The frenzy of term time is exchanged for a casual, laid-back existence, as if the buildings are taking a deep breath after a long day. With the foot traffic gone, it can be the perfect time to pause and to keep an eye out — even if St Andrews does face the east — for the transient magic of the green ray.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
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