Claire's Knee

There's a lot to enjoy in Claire's Knee: the relaxed easy pace, the charming characters, the warm and insightful conversations, the stunning scenery of the French Alps.

Unfortunately I can't find any way to identify or empathize with a world that is so comfortable, so boring, so unambiguous, and ultimately, so superficial. None of the characters seem to work; no-one ever seems anxious or troubled; nothing particularly bad or good happens, or seems likely to ever happen. It's a film of low-level emotions, and low stakes -- for the characters, and for the viewers.

In this bland world, the only question of importance becomes: will the main character, a man of 35 or older, seduce one of the two teenage beauties? No particularly momentous moral calculus is involved, and ultimately the stakes were so low that I could not bring myself to care. The character is good man, or he's a lecher, or he's neither...but I feel Rohmer did not give me any reason why any of this might matter.

Claire's Knee is a hymn of praise to French charm, bourgeois comforts, and inconsequential easy pleasures. If that's your thing, enjoy yourself with this film. Me, I'll be over there in the corner, watching films by directors that ask harder questions.

This is one of the best movies of Rohmer's earlier series of moral tales. The movie wonderfully depicts the complicated relatioship between the hero and his desires, represented by Claire, and the reality of Claire's younger sister, who as masterfully played by Beatrice Romand. This is a wonderful comedy of manners, in which we can laugh at all the characters, how in their attempts to fool others, they only fool themselves. Rohmer has intricately plotted every action, I enjoyed every moment of the film.

A self-possessed, fortyish man of the world, on the verge of marriage, summers by the seaside, where his lust fixates on a wised-up nymphet who won't have him. Unsated, his desire moves on to her blank-faced sister--or rather, the sister's lithe, tennis-playing knee.

As always in Rohmer, the audience is cautioned to check its head in the opening scenes; we are forced to dial down to a level of attention where the nuances of conversational game-playing, phony retractions and crafty grabs at checkmate, are the only blips on our radar screen. The way Nestor Almendros photographs it, the seaside locations are so sumptuously sexual they're almost pornographic; they give the genteel proceedings a pregnancy, as if Hitchcockian mayhem is on the verge of eruption. It isn't; but the climax tells a different story from the rest of this cool, crickety, blithe picture--an ominous, O. Henryish one about the price of unfulfilled male desire.

I took a look at CLAIRE'S KNEE on the occasion of the almost-eighty-year-old Rohmer's latest picture, AN AUTUMN TALE, to see how the canon held up--is Rohmer what he seems to be, a sadder-but-wiser op-ed columnist on the subject of love intrigue? Or is he the "tasteful" poet of leetle-girl lechery? I am cynically leaning toward the latter, perhaps because I'm put off by scenes in which French males nod with ironic agreement as their little cherry pie intones earnestly, "Really, I'm a very old soul." Rohmer even has a menopausal (and hence genially washed-up) female watching the fortyish roue's frustrations with a classically Gallic laugh at the human comedy of it all. Rohmer's "tolerance" has an instructional, Old Wave fuddiness about it. And the ending--in which the roue's cruelty is undone by the innocence of youth, as if teenage girls were infants forgetting they had just fall down go boom--is creepy, like a self-reassuring entry in Humbert Humbert's journal.

But Rohmer deserves his due: he's as acute a journalist of move and countermove--some of them unconscious--as Marivaux. Unfortunately, like Marivaux, Rohmer suffers from excess courtliness. One yearns for entropic real life to drool down the sides of his porcelain.

I think the moral point of "Claire's Knee" (probably not Rohmer's) is that Jerome's conversion from womanizer to a serious and challenging relationship with Lucinde, is flawed. And that the flaw is his invoking the escape hatch of an "open marriage." He (or his new persona) half believes that he will not use it, but the accidental presence of two enticing teenagers at his Lake Annecy vacation sets the stage for his self-delusion, his devaluation of intimacy, and for the resurfacing of his sensuous ways.

For "open marriage" as a cover for "adult," is really another form of ambivalence and duplicity. What it means to Jerome is that the door of puerile fantasy is at his fingertips. Thus in the rarified air of Annecy, in the flow of summer, thin, mod teenagers Laura and Claire become not only sex objects to Jerome, but potential love partners--one at 16, assessed as adult enough, and the other 18, assessed as legal. We see them together, he invariably clothed for late autumn weather, they for mid-summer. In the emotional cat and mouse games that ensue, Laura and Claire are, to him, mere temptresses, and perhaps part of a self-test, and not, in any sense, young women with lives of their own & chosen boy friends. Instead, their boundaries begin to blur under his voyeurism, his not so subtle acts of aggression, his familiar touching, fondling, pointed remarks, and prescriptive suggestions. He offers them no affection, no friendship, and no communication.

How could it be otherwise given their demure youth, beauty and his permissive "open marriage," and when possessing them is his goal--pederasty and fetishism his means. But his fling with inspiring youth having fulfilled his KNEEDS, he can now discard Laura and Claire without in any way having deviated from his new mature male role-- as willfully possessive as he's been. Whether Lucinde has actually signed off on the "open" deal or not, she, despite her maturity, worldly success, and her sculptured character, must be no more than a symbol to Jerome, extracted for his KNEEDS, which must come first before commitment and support.

one of the most beautiful movie by Rohmer. when I saw this film for the first time i was in Brasil (Saao Paulo) and the movie was whistled at the end of the performance by the assistance. In fact, I found the movie a little bit ridiculous and native. i reviewed this movie on TV, a few years later, in France, and was then enthusiastic. I've since become a fan of Rohmer and I've seen nearly all of his films.