As I mentioned in part 1, “The Green Ray” has risen in stature since it was released in the mid 80s. This has happened while much of Rohmer’s body of work has faded a bit from cinema history. Two of his moral tales films, “My Night at Maud’s” and “Claire’s Knee” have their supporters. But that second film is problematic in a way that many 1970s films are now in retrospect.

“Claire’s Knee” is about a middle aged man who goes on vacation to think about his romantic life before he decides whether to plunge ahead into marriage. While on this lakeside vacation, he has several romantic encounters, including an infatuation with teenaged girl named Claire. The movie is visually stunning and its style and pace likely inspired “Call Me By Your Name.” But that middle aged male infatuation with a girl who couldn’t be more than 15 was, for some reason, unoffensive to viewers in 1970, but deeply troubling today.

Cinema in the 1970s and the early 1980s was filled with the sexualization of teenaged girls. By the 80s, Rohmer started to understand the creepiness of it, and in his film “Pauline at the Beach,” his title character, yet another attractive teenaged girl, is at least given the line “I am not attracted to adults” to provide Rohmer some safe distance. So, much of Rohmer’s body of work hasn’t aged well.

“The Green Ray,” on the other hand, seems closer to the vibe of our times, and the scenes coming up begin to show that off. We are still in the phase of the movie where Delphine is trying to figure out her vacation plans and is open to the thoughts of others — as well as any supernatural force that wishes to speak to her — as she considers what to do next.

First, we get another title card telling us that it is now July 5 and see Delphine walking the Paris streets alone. She is wearing a sea-foam green blouse. The color green is important throughout the film. Whenever Delphine makes a conscious effort to seek out the green, it indicates her openness to ideas or signals from the universe.

Here she is seeking out vacation advice from family, I believe it is her sister, brother in law and their children, in a discussion about Ireland (the emerald isle.) Her brother in law explains how they mostly camp out in Ireland in the western part of the country and that people are very open to letting anyone just pitch a tent wherever they please in this part of the country. Delphine seems skeptical about visiting because the description sounds too cold and wet, even though her young niece expresses excitement about their Irish trip. Delphine expresses a desire to visit someplace warm, where she can swim and get a suntan, but she doesn’t shut the door to visiting Ireland — she ends the conversation by saying that she needs to talk to Jean-Pierre.

This conversation went on for a couple minutes and the feeling I took away from it was that Delphine wasn’t all that interested in spending time with her family and would go with them only if she had no other option. The closing also introduces us to the mysterious character Jean-Pierre, a man she seems to have had some kind of relationship with in the past, but she also can’t quite let go of it.

The next scene will feature Delphine on the phone with Jean-Pierre, but before we get there, we witness her walking on the street again. As she passes a green street pole, she looks down on the sidewalk and notices the back of a playing card. The back is green with two gold horns of plenty with gold coins inside of them. She turns the card over and notices the Queen of Spades card. We find out later that Delphine interprets this card as a sign of bad luck.

After a July 6 title card, we’re now onto that scene of Delphine talking to Jean-Pierre on the phone. She thanks him for calling — it sounds like he is calling her back after she had already reached out — and she asks if she can spend time at his place in Antebes, a village on the Mediterranean in the south of France. We don’t hear what he says, but can intuit from her reaction that he is planning to be at that location, not in the Alps where she presumed he’d be, so it’s a no-go. He seems to offer her his place in the Alps, but she has no interest in going there alone.

Another title card takes us to July 7, and now we have a very long scene with Delphine talking through her predicament once again with some acquaintances. This scene goes on for so long that I will have to cut it halfway through, otherwise I’ll be writing about it for far too long.

Before she gets to this outdoor lunch scene, we once again see Delphine walking on a Paris street, where she comes across a green poster on a pole that reads “Rediscover Contact with yourself and others.” It appears to be an ad for seances. It offers both group and private sessions. That offer of groups is important, and might influence the conversation she’s about to be pulled into.

This lunch scene is dominated by an extremely irritating woman in a red blouse with dark curly hair named Beatrice who offers very aggressive advice to Delphine. She suggests she go to Florence alone. Delphine says that she’s not interesting in traveling alone — the woman insists that traveling alone is great and it is the best way to meet people. Delphine disagrees, saying she went to Nice alone and was miserable.

The woman then suggests that she go on some kind of group vacation — by that I assume she does not mean a group of people she knows, but some kind of group tour. Delphine calls her crazy for offering this advice — which seems like an aggressive response to me, but I think she might have the seance advertisement in her head as she says this.

Here the conversation takes a very weird turn that feels to me more like something people experience in online conversations than what they typically experience face to face. Delphine accuses Beatrice of attacking her. In response, Beatrice deflects by telling Delphine that she needs to take action, that she can’t go on feeling lonely forever. Then they have a back and forth about whether she is sad, Delphine rejecting the characterization.

Today, we are much more accepting of introverted people and don’t assume that everyone needs to be outgoing in all social circumstances, but this is a very new point of view, and it’s helpful to watch a movie from an earlier era to see how people once responded to personal shyness or independence — it was considered a character flaw to be overcome.

At this point, Beatrice adopts the “need to be cruel to be kind” pose to take the position that she’s offering Delphine some tough advice because she is trying to help her. Delphine calls her mean and Beatrice says that sometimes you need to be a little bit mean. Then she nearly jumps into how her parents raised her, leading Delphine to blurt out “she’s crazy.”

The scene has a fully improvised feel about it typical of American filmmaker John Cassavettes. The actors are clearly just riffing all of this and Rohmer is letting them take it wherever they want. The fact that it’s starting to get very personal and biting lends a sense of authenticity to it that is unusual for a Rohmer film — these people really seem to be getting to the root of their feelings, not hiding behind intellectual poses about religion, art or philosophy.

Delphine defuses the scene a bit by saying that she has someone in her life (Jean-Pierre?) who she is not seeing at the moment. Beatrice accepts this answer, replying that she didn’t know she had someone important in her life and the conversation tales off a bit.

The lunch is not over, though, and I’ll pick it up in the next scene.