Throughout “The Green Ray,” it feels like Delphine is building towards something. She cannot articulate what it is she’s looking for, but in a way, this doesn’t diminish her yearning, it gives it greater heft. She must have some grand romantic vision in her head that will be revealed in the closing scene … right?

Before we get to the moment that changes Delphine’s life, I want to return to that moment in the Paris park where Delphine is reading a book. A very strangely dressed man in a mesh muscle shirt approaches her at that moment, basically just giving her a creepy stare and saying nothing. Delphine flees and eventually snubs him.

That was the only moment in the film where we see Delphine reading a book in public, until we get to the scene at the train station as she prepares to go back to Paris. She is reading Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” and seems to be close to finishing it. While on reading on a bench, a man approaches her.

This man is dressed normally, in a black t-shirt and jeans. He’s blandly attractive. But he doesn’t go up and talk to Delphine, he takes a seat less than 10 feet from her and just stares directly at her, almost exactly like the guy at the park. He looks up four times and catches her eye without saying a word. Now, that’s not all that unusual if you’re in a public restaurant or cafe with many people in between and perhaps some distance, but these two people are alone and basically on top of each other, but these glances pass silently.

Finally, Delphine breaks the silence and asks him if he’s interested in the book she’s reading. He says that he’s “familiar with it,” which I want to note isn’t the same as saying he’s read it or liked it. He then comes over and sits right next to her, asking it it’s ok. She responds “oui, bien sur.”

So, she starts recounting her ditsy vacation to him, but then asks “how about you?” He responds that he’s off to Saint-Jean-des-Luz for the weekend. Ok so far. They discuss what they do for a living. He’s a cabinet maker, she’s a secretary. They have an awkward moment of silence, then Delphine asks if Saint-Jean-des-Luz is far away and he says, no, it’s just five minutes away. Does he mean it’s a five minute train ride or walk? It’s getting confusing to me. We never see them board a train so apparently it's a short walk from the station, raising the obvious question of why he's hanging out at the station at all.

Delphine goes back to complaining about her vacation, says it was a bit of a flop. He responds “bad weather?” Huh? He’s in the same place she is at the moment, the weather looked fine, why would he say this? Or better, why wouldn’t Rohmer cut the improvised scene at this point and ask the actor to come up with something more interesting to ask her?

And then, after a brief cut away to other passengers in the station, Delphine asks this guy she just met and had almost no conversation with if she could go with him to Saint-Jean-des-Luz. Now, to me, this feels like a cop out. We just walked through a 90 minute movie with Delphine’s romantic angst hanging over every second and she dropped all of her supposed standards and unspoken checklists the minute she runs into a guy she finds attractive? That’s all there is to it?

But I don’t think Rohmer is cheating in this moment, because he would agree with the complete randomness. He would argue that relationships don’t begin because two people go through a rigorous process of determining if they are right for each other, they happen mostly as a matter of vibes in the moment that they happen. And I think Rohmer has a point, because basically every couple I’ve ever met that stays together for a decent length of time seem to have come together in a haphazard fashion. If there are factors that you can point at in one or both that seem likely to have brought them together, those features often fade away within a year or two — and they are left together for inexplicable reasons.

Rohmer, a devout Catholic, believes in fate and most of the heroes in his stories do as well. So next we see them wandering near a marina, they sit down to have a drink and Delphine explains how she is very wary of men and thinks they are just trying to get her into bed, so she rejects them. But she admits that she pursued this guy.

After a brief discussion of their romantic pasts and presents, Delphine launches into her first monologue since she discussed vegetarianism: another long, passionate rant against having short-term, mostly physical relationships. She makes a good case, which I agree with, that if you are already lonely, they tend to make you feel even more so afterwards.

Even though I agree with the points she’s making, there’s a lot of black and white thinking within it. She claims to be able to know what a man’s intentions are by reading the look on his face, and if he desires sex, then she shuts down the conversation. While I think using your intuition is valuable, and could help to be on guard for ways she could be used, to just shut off all conversation is to basically imprison yourself, as she has done until now. And I simply don’t buy that this guy, who was just staring at her for nearly a minute, didn’t have sex on his mind before the conversation began.

My interpretation is that she knew he had sexual interest, but didn’t care because she found him good looking — and she is now projecting all kind of virtues on to him because he looks like the type of guy she wants. But I will give the guy some credit for just taking all of this in patiently.

They’re now back to walking and Delphine sees on the boardwalk a small shop called Rayon Vert (Green Ray) souvenirs. She laughs and, instead of sharing with him the Jules Verne story or her personal interpretation of it, she just says “there’s something you wouldn’t understand.” She then suggests they walk to a peninsula together to watch the sunset, which looks really far away to me. He agrees.

They arrive at this peninsula sit on a bench and he asks Delphine if she wants to spend a few days with him in Bayonne. She responds “you must be joking, why would you want to spend a few days with me?” He tells her that he would like to and asks her if she would like to as well, but she hesitates to give a response. She asks him to be patient.

So then she asks if he’s heard of the green ray, the last ray of light in a sunset, and says Jules Verne wrote a book about it. He said he never read it (here, she could tell him that neither did she.) She then says that the green ray helps you to know. He asks what, she says, I’ll let you know. And then we see the sun set.

And, of course, Delphine starts to cry because she’s always crying in the movie. He comforts her … and they wait for the sunset. By the way, this sunset was not filmed in France, Rohmer traveled to the Marshall Island to get the iconic shot.

It’s a beautiful event to be captured on film, an extremely brief, but unmistakable moment of green light. Delphine exclaims “oui!” and the movie fades to black.

So we never really know what Delphine learned from the green ray, but given all that we’ve experienced with her, it seems very likely that she went away with him, they blindly entered a relationship based on this superstition, were married less than a year later and the guy started cheating on Delphine within six months after that.

Ok, we don’t really know any of that. But the green ray was very likely enough to convince Delphine to give this guy a chance, and after all we’ve seen for the 90 minutes leading up to the event, that was a small miracle.