Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)

Aurora Cornu and Jean-Claude Brialy in Claire's Knee

Jerome: Jean-Claude Brialy
Aurora: Aurora Cornu
Laura: Béatrice Romand
Claire: Laurence de Monaghan
Mme. Walter: Michèle Montel
Gilles: Gérard Falconetti
Vincent: Fabrice Luchini

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Néstor Almendros
Film editing: Cécile Decugis

Call me naïve, but I never realized before how much Claire's Knee is a kinder, gentler version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Éric Rohmer's characters exist to talk, not to act, so that physical seduction recedes in the face of verbal dalliance. The novelist Aurora in Claire's Knee is not, like the Marquise de Merteuil of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel and its many adaptations, out to deflower the innocent, using Jerome, her equivalent of Valmont, as her instrument. For her, the dalliance of older man and teenager is an intellectual exercise, one that might result in a novel for her and only incidentally in pleasure for him. So it's also of importance that of the two jeunes filles en fleurs of the film, it's the more intellectual Laura who truly attracts Jerome, while the strikingly pretty but vapid Claire may be dismissed along with the brief erotic thrill he gets from caressing her titular joint. But has a film ever been sexier without actual nudity and copulation? Add to that the taboos about underage sex, and we get a film taut with suspense yet essentially light-hearted and full of wisdom about the complexities of love.

Éric Rohmer's First Two "Moral Tales"

The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Éric Rohmer, 1963)

Barbet Schroeder and Claudine Soubrier in The Bakery Girl of Monceau

Young Man: Barbet Schroeder
Jacqueline: Claudine Soubrier
Sylvie: Michèle Girardon
Voice of Young Man: Bernard Tavernier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Bruno Barbey, Jean-Michel Meurice

Suzanne's Career (Éric Rohmer, 1963)

Philippe Beuzen and Catherine Sée in Suzanne's Career

Suzanne: Catherine Sée
Bertrand: Philippe Beuzen
Guillaume: Christian Charrière
Sophie: Diane Wilkinson

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Daniel Lacambre

One-third of Éric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales series, the first two films, The Bakery Girl of Monceau and Suzanne's Career, together take up about an hour and a half of screen time and were shot on the cheap, using 16 mm film and available locations. But their greatest virtue is economy of storytelling. By "moral," of course, Rohmer meant anything but didactic; instead, his films are about the way people behave, especially in matters of sexual attraction. He leaves any judgment of what his characters do up to the audience, though sometimes his characters deliver their own verdicts about what has been done and said. Especially "said," because Rohmer's films are typically more about talk than action. Both films are also about the young in Paris in the early 1960s, a period and place on the brink of a revolution not only in politics but also in morals, manners, and style. This was a time just before the young of Paris reinvented themselves as what Jean-Luc Godard would call, in Masculin Féminin (1966), "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola." The students in these films still wear suits and neckties, not bluejeans, to class, and even among themselves maintain a kind of politesse. The protagonist-narrators of both films are shy guys, dithering on the edges of their infatuations and needing help from more outgoing friends to make the first move at the young women they have fallen for. The young man played by future director Barbet Schroeder in The Bakery Girl is a bit more outgoing than Bertrand in Suzanne's Career, but both blunder their way into romance. In fact, the former has a touch of the caddishness of Guillaume in the latter film, hitting on Jacqueline, the lower class bakery girl, while trying to catch a glimpse of the more sophisticated Sylvie, a member of his own social class. Even when the tables are turned, and he learns that Sylvie, laid up with a broken ankle, has been spying on him while he is toying with Jacqueline, he still throws over the bakery girl for her. We don't see Jacqueline's reaction to being dumped -- that might have tilted the moral tale toward didacticism. And Sylvie seems to feel no remorse about either her voyeurism or his touches of caddishness: She marries him anyway. Suzanne's Career is more complex, with money (or the lack of it) playing a key role in the amatory games being played by its quartet of characters. As in The Bakery Girl, it's the woman who apparently wins out in the end: Suzanne, after her on-again, off-again relationship with Guillaume, winds up happily married -- at least if we can judge from Bertrand's assessment of the situation. As always in Rohmer's films, the talk is what matters.

The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

Vincent Gauthier and Marie Rivière in The Green Ray

Delphine: Marie Rivière
Manuella: María Luisa García
Beatrice: Béatrice Romand
Françoise: Rosette
Edouard: Eric Hamm
Lena: Carita
Joel: Joël Comarlot
Jacques: Vincent Gauthier

Director: Éric Rohmer
Screenplay: Marie Rivière, Éric Rohmer
Cinematography: Sophie Maintigneux
Film editor: María Luisa García
Music: Jean-Louis Valéro

Delphine is shy, self-conscious, self-doubting, and frankly somewhat of a pain. At the beginning of Éric Rohmer's film, which is part of his series "Comedies and Proverbs," a successor to his more celebrated "Six Moral Tales," she has been ditched by a friend with whom she was planning to go on vacation. It's July, which in France means you're obligated to go on a vacation, especially if you live in Paris, which will be abandoned to the tourists and the pigeons in August. Her long-distance boyfriend, whom we never meet, has his own plans, so she spends much of the film searching for someone to accompany her. Ireland, where her family plans to vacation, is too cold and wet for her. Finally, a friend invites her to stay with her and her family in Cherbourg, but Delphine finds all the fuss and noise of a large group depressing, since she has no one she can call her own. Moreover, she's a vegetarian amid a hearty group of carnivores, and finds herself spending a lot of time (and talk -- this is a Rohmer film, after all) defending her dietary choice: It makes her feel "airy," she claims. She returns to Paris, then makes a mad one-day dash to an Alpine resort where she walks up an Alp and back down to take a return bus to Paris, where she finds herself being followed by a creep on the street. Finally, another friend takes pity on the increasingly depressed Delphine and offers her her brother-in-law's apartment in Biarritz. Things aren't much better there, though she strikes up an acquaintance with a holidaying Swedish girl, Lena, who is as gregarious and sexually adventurous as Delphine is solitary and touchy. They go out on the town together, but Lena's vulgarity offends her and she flees from the advances of one of the men Lena helps pick up. But in Biarritz she has also overheard the conversation of a group of older people about Jules Verne's novel The Green Ray, which centers on the atmospheric phenomenon sometimes called "the green flash," which occurs when the sun is setting. In the novel, observers of the green ray supposedly gain a magical insight into themselves and the people they're with. At the film's end, Delphine has somehow overcome her shyness and struck up an acquaintance with Jacques, a handsome young man she meets in the station as she's waiting for her train back to Paris. And, yes, they observe the green flash together. End of film. There's a great deal of charm to Rohmer's fable, which was crafted with the assistance of Marie Rivière, the actress who plays Delphine. Much of the dialogue was improvised by the cast, and the film was shot on 16 mm to keep the actors as spontaneous as possible. Occasionally, you can see a member of the cast, especially the children in the Cherbourg sequence, look straight at the camera as if uncertain about their performance, but it only helps maintain a kind of documentary feeling to the film. This is a wisp of a film, but it's heartfelt.

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

La Collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967)

The French New Wave films launched numerous film acting careers, most notably those of the hyphenated Jeans: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Jean-Pierre Léaud. One of the longest of them has been that of Patrick Bauchau, the lead actor of Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. Though his name may not be as well-known as the other three, he has worked steadily since his uncredited debut in Rohmer's short film Suzanne's Career (1963), the second of the director's "Six Moral Tales." La Collectionneuse is the fourth of the tales. though it was filmed before the third in the series, My Night at Maud's (1969). It was an impressive feature debut for Bauchau, whose later work includes a turn as a Bond villain in A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985), and appearances on many American TV series. Bauchau's character, Adrien, is introduced to us in one of three brief prologues. The first shows Haydée (Haydée Politoff) walking along the beach in a bikini. In the second, the artist Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) discusses one of his pieces, a paint can studded with razor blades, with a writer (Alain Jouffroy). And in the third Adrien and his girlfriend, Carole (Mijanou Bardot), and a friend of hers (Annik Morice), talk about beauty in that elevated French intellectual way familiar to viewers of Rohmer's films. We learn that Adrien is going to stay with Daniel in a house in the south of France while Carole does a modeling job in London. When the two men get to the villa they discover that they're sharing it with the 20-year-old Haydée. The potential of this ménage à trois is obvious, especially after Adrien finds Haydée in bed with a young man -- the first of many. But this being one of Rohmer's morality plays, things do not go quite so obviously. For one thing, Adrien has sworn that he will spend his vacation doing nothing, which includes having sex. He calls Haydée a "collector" because of her sleeping around. But with actors as attractive as the young Bauchau and Politoff the sexual tension persists. The film develops into a satire on the pretensions and artifice of intellectuals, without ever tipping its hand in the direction it's going. (Though there is a priceless Chinese vase -- Adrien is an art dealer -- that is something of a Chekhov's gun.) Much of the film's dialogue was improvised by the three principals. The brilliant cinematography is by Rohmer's frequent collaborator Néstor Almendros.

My Night at Maud's (Éric Rohmer, 1969)

A moral tale: Once upon a time, a brave and chaste knight saw a fair young lady in church, and wished that she were his. The devil, hearing this, arranged for the knight to be tempted by a beautiful sorceress. But when the knight resisted the carnal temptations of the sorceress, he was rewarded with the love and the hand of the fair young lady. Éric Rohmer's moral tale: Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an engineer who has recently moved to Clermont-Ferrand, is an intellectual Catholic, determined at the age of 34 to settle down and get married after several failed love affairs. At mass one day he sees a beautiful young woman (Marie-Christine Barrault), and longs to get to know her. Leaving the church, he sees the woman get on a moped, and he follows her in his car until they are separated by traffic. Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a philosophy professor and a Marxist, who takes him to see his friend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorcee. Vidal gets drunk and leaves early, and when it begins to snow heavily, Jean-Louis stays to spend the night with Maud. But they do little more than talk -- about his Catholicism, about the philosophy of Pascal, about his life and hers. She and her husband were unfaithful to each other, and her lover was killed when his car skidded on the ice -- one reason she forbids Jean-Louis to drive in the snow. They literally sleep together: She in the nude, he fully clothed and wrapped in a coverlet she lends him, though both are in the same bed. In the morning he makes a pass at her that she brushes off, and as he looks out the window he sees the young woman he saw at mass, and runs out to introduce himself to her. Her name is Françoise, and she is a student at the university where Vidal teaches. They make a date for later in the day, and afterward he drives her home to her student apartment. Stuck in the snow again, he spends the night, but not in her room: She gives him a key to the apartment of another student who is away. Five years later, they are married and taking their young son to the beach, when they meet Maud on the path. Jean-Louis realizes from Françoise's reaction that she knows Maud -- in fact, Françoise, who has confessed that she had an affair with a married man, may have been the lover of Maud's husband. This is the third of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," and perhaps the most successful: It was nominated for Oscars for Rohmer's screenplay and as the best foreign-language film. But a lot of critics and viewers found it insufferably talky in that peculiarly French over-intellectualized way -- a curious objection to a film that features four attractive actors and a strong emphasis on sex. And the talk is far wittier than anything you're likely to hear in a movie today.