the story of an older man lusting after teens is an icky and taboo subject that's almost always mishandled, and, arguably, doesn't need to be told, but rohmer explores it with an unthinkable elegance. his definitive knack for dialogue translates the inexplicable into the explicable, pinning down the intricacies of desire's quicksilver nature: a flame that can be ignited and snuffed in the same heartbeat.

i was especially struck by laura –– she's infinitely more of an interesting, intelligent, complex, and compelling character than claire (and also easily the better actress), but it's the latter who is the object of jerome's misplaced desire, precisely because she doesn't want him like laura does. GOD, isn't that frustrating!!! would've loved to have…

Eric Rohmer's 5th Moral Tale

-->Possible moral topic(s) treated: Emotional manipulation for the fulfillment of perverted fantasies. BAM!!

Rohmer accomplishes the ridiculously difficult task of putting into coherent (sometimes sophisticated, but never sophistic) words the complex mentality that drives men's impulses into scandalously immoral actions. Maybe our fathers saw scandal in the age difference issue; today, it doesn't bother us that much anymore because society is, in some respects, more degraded than before. Hence, Le Genou de Claire arises new questionings today.

I use the word "scandalous" because Jerome's ambitions are truly perverted. The direction is impeccable and accurate because only all of us men are capable of understanding the powerlessness caused by a gorgeous female figure in an instant,…

Claire’s Knee is an equal parts epiphanic and excruciating experience. As a naturalistic take on the French bourgeois and their larger than life views on love, sex and desires, Claire’s Knee is bold enough to dance around the fire, while still fully aware of its moral complications.

Claire’s Knee centers around a middle-aged man's summer encounters with two teenage sisters, and his highly unpredictable journey of juggling his experimental affections. With a breathtakingly sunshine-drenched cinematography, director Éric Rohmer offered enormous visual aids to compensate for the lack of any plot developments on screen. After all, Claire’s Knee is almost purely dialogue-driven, with the majority of the runtime consisting of different characters sharing their perspective opinions on sex and love.

What…

The goatish gaze, the author’s theorem: "To be written, it must happen." The shapely structure is a transposition of Laclos with Nabokov echoes filtering through, Eric Rohmer sculpts it most sagaciously against the luscious greens and blues of Annecy in the summertime. Wolves and foxes "in transit" at the lake house, the cultural attaché (Jean-Claude Brialy) a few weeks shy of matrimony and the droll novelist (Aurora Cornu) who prefers discovering to inventing, one is a pawn in the other’s scénario. She has an unfinished narrative in need of a guinea pig ("a good story with banal characters"), he enjoys himself as the potential seducer of their host’s teenage daughter (Béatrice Romand) until one day he stares at the dimpled…

As direct as some of the dialogue is in this film, I am still unsure if I should take it at face value. Jerome's bizarre flirtations and awkward manipulations in this are generally creepy, despite his assertions of love for his fiance. The teenaged targets of his experiment are largely unwitting and while they have at least depth of character to some degree--not a very large one by any measure--they still remain part of the story solely as targets for his project. It just felt awkward at best to witness this.

That the film seems to capture a lot of interesting relationship dynamics and explore them from a slight remove just makes the creepiness all the more unfortunate, as it's…

Some say that women are always over-analyzing everything. Well, men are trying to justify everything they do (especially their desires) with the most idiotic and weirdest (to the point where they don't make sense) justification. For a while I watched the film without realizing anything what was going on. Conversations. Well, they are French. At some points I started thinking about how creepy these situations actually were. It wasn't until the last conversations between Jerome and Aurora that I realized how hypocrite, full of himself Jerome was. But unfortunately he reflects so deeply on other men as well. It is clever take on the primitive elements of the nature of man. And I'm sure that it draws from own experiences…

[84]

Professedly simple—“Oh, CLAIRE’S KNEE? What’s that about?” / “Well this guy…he tries to touch a woman named Claire’s knee.” / “…”—but only deceitfully so. Veritably, it’s a film about so many things: The conflict between what we possess and what we desire; the discrepancies in the things we say vs. the things we do; the insatiable craving for control; the painful lengths one might endure for self-gratification; and most importantly, the fine art of crushing self-delusion and its often-narcissistic reverberation. Prefaced under the guise of “inspiration” by a novelist (and likely ex-lover) who prefers sculpted reality over imagination, Jerome - the ultimate Rohmerist libertine, equipped with a proclaimed complacency that’s constantly (and rightfully) prodded by those around him -…

5x5 #1: Directors Challenge [Film 12]

For a moment, this movie had me convinced that Rohmer’s characters live in a world where everyone speaks how they feel with ease. But by the end, you realize that characters only speak how they think, and how they feel is still just as intangible as ever. They can reason their feelings, but are these logical conclusions always right? Claire’s Knee is about people who use rational thought to justify whatever they feel. It starts as a game, two adult friends decide to see how romance develops between the grown man and the teenage girls that are all vacationing on the waterfront. The movie doesn’t blatantly condemn the game, which isn’t a problem if…