This will be a relatively short section, because I’ll be completing the day that began with with dockside flirtation. I do need to clear something up before I do that — the movie actually jumped ahead 10 days in the last part. We are not on July 8, but rather July 18. This makes sense, because a trip to Cherbourg probably is something with a bit of planning involved.

We’re now at another outside meal and Delphine is with more people we do not know and won’t see again. That unnamed friend from the previous section is there, as well as three adult men, one other adult woman and a few children. We don’t really know who is paired up with who, but I get a sense from the scene that none of the men are available.

Some kind of pork has been prepared for this meal, which the server declares is both “rare and very rare.” I don’t eat pork, but the idea of eating very rare pork is terrifying to me. I can only imagine all the possible diseases and parasites that could come from undercooked pork.

Anyway, Delphine declares as the food is being passed around that she is a vegetarian. From here, the scene becomes a massive interrogation by the other meal participants about what she can eat — can you eat fish? What about shellfish? The idiotic questions remind me of when I was a vegetarian in the 1990s and why I eventually gave it up, eating in groups became too difficult. I had no problem making do with whatever food was available, but for some reason the word vegetarian freaks some people out and they feel obliged to make all kinds of unnecessary accommodations.

Delphine actually holds her own in the conversation this time and she seems to be enjoying it. She talks about how barbaric she finds it to eat slaughtered animals and one of the other diners agrees that when he was a child and went into butcher shops, he found the cuts of meat appalling, but buying from a supermarket has given him the emotional distance to eat without awareness.

Delphine argues that we should not give up that awareness and details numerous strong arguments for being a vegetarian. The only meat I eat is fish and I’m in agreement with her. But it’s interesting to me that Delphine seems most comfortable taking a position in opposition to eveyone else. Isolation doesn’t seem to bother her — in a sense making her like me.

That’s all there is to this scene. The great American director Howard Hawks once said that to make a successful movie, all you need are two or three great scenes. All you need to do in the rest of the film is not annoy your audience. I mentioned yesterday the improvisational style of American director John Cassavettes. He took the exact opposite approach to Hawks. Cassavettes tried to make every scene unique and let his actors take it to the edge. As a result, his movies were packed with a collection of great and irritating scenes, making his films a challenge to take in.

Eric Rohmer has a slightly different approach. Rohmer doesn’t irritate his audience, but he doesn’t shoot for greatness very often either. His movies often seem to wander for the first two thirds … and if those two or three scenes do eventually arrive, they are almost always back loaded towards the conclusion.

The Green Ray is the rare movie where the best scene is unquestionably the last.