I had a strange experience watching The Green Ray.
At first, I found myself judging her. You are wallowing in your own pain. Where is this going? I didn’t trust the film. This happens often when I watch films (from any era) that do a lot of pseudo-intellectual “gazing” at the female. I don’t trust that the eye doesn’t come from a place of power, even if that power is recognizing female power. I feel like a fantastic example of this is A Promising Young Woman. She is to be looked at by the viewer and it is inescapable. It infuriates me.
I think I was wrong about The Green Ray. I related to Delphine as the film waxed on. I was that young woman: I felt my hopelessness and self-inflicted solitude was a batter in a cake that societal structure made for me. I supplied the ingredients, because I thought, well, I have to make a cake: This society I am in simultaneously and painfully values naivety, while punishing a young woman for not being responsible (which, in my case and in Delphine’s, responsibility is indeed tied to fitting in).
Ultimately, what this film is about is seeing the green ray as the sun disappears below the horizon. An underwhelming but notable flash of bright green as the light dips to its lowest. A man in the film enthusiastically explains to friends that it takes the right conditions, so the window of opportunity is not only very slim on the day, but the day itself is rare.
Through her naivety, Delphine ironically actually sets herself up for this green ray of the love she is looking for. She is manifesting what she wants by not doing what she thinks she should be doing. Like her, young people create the perfect conditions by naturally being and following their gut. She is regularly told throughout the film by other characters to try this and that, travel here and there, to get what she wants. But it’s her own wandering, aligning to her beliefs in values in who she is, that gets her what she seeks.
And like the green ray, there is a narrow window to get what we seek — a narrow set of principles by which it will happen, and love is no different. Loneliness only sets in due to your own parameters that you set, and you blame yourself, but its those same parameters that will lead you to the ultimate happiness later on because you set up the exact structure for which the green ray of your life will appear.
Our gaze at her ultimately becomes joining her in her gaze of herself. It loses its exploitivity.