Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: Love in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Love in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)

Bernard Verley in Love in the Afternoon

Frédéric: Bernard Verley
Chloé: Zouzou
Hélène: Françoise Verley
Gérard: Daniel Ceccaldi
Fabienne: Malvina Penne
Martine: Elisabeth Ferrier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros

Love in the Afternoon, released in the United States originally as Chloé in the Afternoon, is the last of Éric Rohmer's cycle of "Six Moral Tales," and it may be the most conventionally moralistic of them all. It's about a man, Frédéric, happily married, with one child and another on the way, who indulges in the fantasies about women in which all men indulge -- even Jimmy Carter, remember, confessed to committing lust in his heart. He's careful to avoid anything other than fantasies until an old acquaintance, Chloé, re-enters his life. Free-spirited and footloose in ways that Frédéric once remembers being, Chloé offers an enlargement of his fantasies: a dalliance that never extends to sexual intercourse -- until, of course, the day that consummation actually looms. Like most of Rohmer's "Tales," Love in the Afternoon is mostly talk -- rich, stimulating dialogue that only the philosophically loquacious French seem able to indulge in. It's a tour de force in sexual tension, with splendid performances by Bernard Verley and Zouzou -- one of those supremely French jolie laide actresses who audibly suck on their cigarettes.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Love in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972)

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