Claire's Knee

Fair warning--seeing Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee today, 40 years after it was made--may cause arguments. The fifth of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, the film presents, at its center, a fairly reprehensible cad, a man who toys with the affection of two teenage girls, while being egged on by a female writer who must have missed the memos going around on feminism.

The story is set one summer in the French Alps, in vacation homes by a lake. Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a diplomat, is on holiday, but he will return to his post in Sweden and marry his long-time girlfriend later in the summer. He runs into Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old flame, who is lodging with a family on the other side of the lake. There are two teenagers living there--Laura (Beatrice Romand), a precocious girl who develops a crush on Jerome, and later her step-sister, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), who has an oafish boyfriend, Gilles.

Aurora immediately picks up on Laura's crush and tries to encourage it. This is because she's a fiction writer, and sees the people around her as characters. She describes a story she's thinking about to Jerome, about an older man who watches young girls play tennis, and asks him how it should end. In another telling moment, she looks at a fresco of Don Quixote, who is wearing a blindfold, and says, "Heroes are always blindfolded."

Jerome tells Laura that he is engaged, and she is upset, but then he accompanies her on a hike and makes a pass at her. She maturely tells him that she wants to be with someone who loves her. There are many discussions of love in the film. Jerome thinks that he and his fiancee are ideally matched because they are good friends and have known each other for six years. He also says, incorrectly, that he has stopped thinking about other women. Laura thinks that friendship and love can be mutually exclusive.

Jerome loses interest in his dalliance with Laura when Claire, a leggy blonde, shows up. He becomes obsessed on the title joint, which he calls "the magnetic pole of my desire." He is interested in her only as sport, telling Aurora that if she came on to him he would turn her down. He is interested in her only because she is not interested in him. Aurora should tell him he's a pig at this point, but I guess the French don't think that way.

So Jerome ends up cruelly revealing to Claire that her boyfriend was kissing another girl, and while attempting to comfort her fondles that glorious knee while she dabs her eyes with his hankie, a scene I found infinitely creepy. It reminded me of the actions of Trigorin in Chekhov's The Seagull, who destroys Nina simply because he can.

The color photography, by Nestor Almendros, is soft and lovely, and belies the cruelty going on. The acting is a bit strange, too. Brialy, who reminds me of a cross between Liev Schreiber and Griffin Dunne, is effective if he was aiming to present Jerome as a smug abuser of women, while Romand, who would later go on to appear in several of Rohmer's films, is very appealing. It's clear that De Monaghan and Cornu are amateurs, though. I caught Cornu looking at the camera a couple of times.

I'm not sure what the reaction was back in 1970, when attitudes about casual and intergenerational sex were different than they are now. Was Jerome seen as a brute then, or was it just par for the course? David Denby, in this week's New Yorker, pens a short ode to Rohmer, remembering how his spirits were lifted on a cold February day by seeing Claire's Knee. I guess you had to be there.