Le genou de Claire (1970)
(Claire's Knee)
Country: FR
Technical: col 106m
Director: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romand, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
July beside the Lac d'Annecy: a diplomat returns home to sell his family house before marrying his partner of some years standing. He meets by chance another old female friend, a writer, with whom his relations have remained purely platonic, and she challenges him to seduce, or be seduced by, the pubescent daughter of her own landlady, apparently besotted with him. Although able to remain detached in this particular experiment, when the latter's stepsister arrives at the house our hero is oddly disturbed by her, and resents her lover's evident inability to appreciate her finer points - or joints!
Review:
One of the director's Contes moraux, this again has its characters, whether experienced or not in matters sexual, discussing their sentiments and motivations in such a way that their essential self-delusion always shines through. The central personage is a bit of a roué who has fooled himself that a marriage to a woman for whom he feels nothing more than friendship is the best course he can take, while he cannot keep his hands off every other woman he meets, and his attempts to prove his impermeability to feminine charms of other provenance come disarmingly unstuck when he beholds the bronzed and bikini-clad figure of an eighteen year-old. At the same time his climactic heroic act is based upon revealing to her that her lover is unfaithful and unworthy, whereas he has seen him doing nothing more than commit those same possibly gratuitous gestures of easy physicality that he indulges in all the way through. Rohmer has great fun having Brialy reach for binoculars to spy on the lovers and gaze up at the legs of a girl half his age, before finally fondling her knee in the penultimate scene, like a dirty old man. And yet, because this is a French film, there is a refreshing lack of censure about all this observation, just a gentle, mocking irony.
(Claire's Knee)
Country: FR
Technical: col 106m
Director: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romand, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
July beside the Lac d'Annecy: a diplomat returns home to sell his family house before marrying his partner of some years standing. He meets by chance another old female friend, a writer, with whom his relations have remained purely platonic, and she challenges him to seduce, or be seduced by, the pubescent daughter of her own landlady, apparently besotted with him. Although able to remain detached in this particular experiment, when the latter's stepsister arrives at the house our hero is oddly disturbed by her, and resents her lover's evident inability to appreciate her finer points - or joints!
Review:
One of the director's Contes moraux, this again has its characters, whether experienced or not in matters sexual, discussing their sentiments and motivations in such a way that their essential self-delusion always shines through. The central personage is a bit of a roué who has fooled himself that a marriage to a woman for whom he feels nothing more than friendship is the best course he can take, while he cannot keep his hands off every other woman he meets, and his attempts to prove his impermeability to feminine charms of other provenance come disarmingly unstuck when he beholds the bronzed and bikini-clad figure of an eighteen year-old. At the same time his climactic heroic act is based upon revealing to her that her lover is unfaithful and unworthy, whereas he has seen him doing nothing more than commit those same possibly gratuitous gestures of easy physicality that he indulges in all the way through. Rohmer has great fun having Brialy reach for binoculars to spy on the lovers and gaze up at the legs of a girl half his age, before finally fondling her knee in the penultimate scene, like a dirty old man. And yet, because this is a French film, there is a refreshing lack of censure about all this observation, just a gentle, mocking irony.
(Claire's Knee)
Country: FR
Technical: col 106m
Director: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romand, Fabrice Luchini
Synopsis:
July beside the Lac d'Annecy: a diplomat returns home to sell his family house before marrying his partner of some years standing. He meets by chance another old female friend, a writer, with whom his relations have remained purely platonic, and she challenges him to seduce, or be seduced by, the pubescent daughter of her own landlady, apparently besotted with him. Although able to remain detached in this particular experiment, when the latter's stepsister arrives at the house our hero is oddly disturbed by her, and resents her lover's evident inability to appreciate her finer points - or joints!
Review:
One of the director's Contes moraux, this again has its characters, whether experienced or not in matters sexual, discussing their sentiments and motivations in such a way that their essential self-delusion always shines through. The central personage is a bit of a roué who has fooled himself that a marriage to a woman for whom he feels nothing more than friendship is the best course he can take, while he cannot keep his hands off every other woman he meets, and his attempts to prove his impermeability to feminine charms of other provenance come disarmingly unstuck when he beholds the bronzed and bikini-clad figure of an eighteen year-old. At the same time his climactic heroic act is based upon revealing to her that her lover is unfaithful and unworthy, whereas he has seen him doing nothing more than commit those same possibly gratuitous gestures of easy physicality that he indulges in all the way through. Rohmer has great fun having Brialy reach for binoculars to spy on the lovers and gaze up at the legs of a girl half his age, before finally fondling her knee in the penultimate scene, like a dirty old man. And yet, because this is a French film, there is a refreshing lack of censure about all this observation, just a gentle, mocking irony.