It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. Writer Aurora (Cornu) has been trying to get her friend, soon-to-be-married diplomat Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy) to flirt with her landlord's young daughter Laura (Beatrice Romand), for which he later reproaches her, vacationing in the French Alps in Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, 1970. Looks don’t matter to me. At the same time, the fates of his characters remain open-ended, subject to further choices and conversations. Claire’s Knee, from French New Wave writer and director Éric Rohmer, was released in France in December 1970, the fifth of his six “moral tales.” It came on the heels of Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, which was the art-house hit of 1969. But he tells his friend Aurora that he has become fascinated by Claire's knee; that it might be the point through which she could be approached, just as another girl might respond to a caress on the neck, or the cheek, or the arm. Opposing Eric Rohmer to any male filmmaker who pretends to know men so well that he could never find a flaw in their ways, god forbid ever mock them, is pure entertainment. Claire is a type—“I find it quite difficult to talk to her,” Jérôme admits to Aurora. At one point earlier in the film, Laura and Jérôme are discussing love, the latter’s six-year engagement and sense of that relationship’s inevitability. In fact, in Rohmer’s universe, women are instruments of men’s improvement, in the sense that they shake them up, force them to confront prejudices; and in some of his films, men do the same to women. The possibilities multiply through the sheer range of women in whom Rohmer interests himself: shopgirls and secretaries, those figures on the margins of most directors’ consciousness, move front and center, have problems as deserving of close attention as party girls and divas and more cerebral professionals. (1967); the camera forsaking its neutrality in, (1969) to focus on the wittily inviting Françoise Fabian, lying under a fur coverlet as thick and white as the snow outside; the, (1972) having fantasies about the damsels he encounters in the streets of Paris. Shop the hottest styles and trends from cool jewellery & hair accessories to gifts & school supplies. Claire's Knee Criterion 347 1970 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 106 min. “I feel absolutely powerless around girls like that.” Which is precisely what attracts this rather conventional womanizer, who usually knows in advance that a certain woman desires him and pursues accordingly. Only the element of surprise his malice creates and his gesture of comfort give him the chance of doing so.”. This sort of safe philosophy of love is a characteristic of Rohmer’s complacent males, but the commitment that goes with it can’t be summarily dismissed. Jean-Claude Brialy is excellent in a difficult role. that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. And yet, in a way, "Claire's Knee" is indeed about Jerome's feelings for Claire's knee, which is a splendid knee. Now if I were to say, for example, that "Claire's Knee" is about Jerome's desire to caress the knee of Claire, you would be about a million miles from the heart of this extraordinary film. The wills of Rohmer’s protagonists are foiled and their prejudices unmasked—for us if not always for them—by women who, through their cunning or their simple directness, elude their theoretical categories, even (or especially) when they are lower in the social or intellectual order than the men who presume to toy with them. I’m getting married,” says Jean-Claude Brialy’s Jérôme, in Claire’s Knee, when he runs into his old friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu). Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life. Rohmer has an uncanny ability to make his actors seem as if they were going through the experiences they portray. (7) John Orr has a less flattering interpretation: “His obsession with Claire’s knee is a metaphor for the limit of desire…. Lovestruck females are saved from the total dependency of so many love stories by their bonds with other women. He becomes obsessed with desire to test this theory, and one day has an opportunity to touch the knee at last. Claire's Knee. Molly Haskell is a critic and author whose books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies; Love and Other Infectious Diseases; Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited; and Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films. “Women aid my spiritual progress,” he says to Maud, and is immediately half-ashamed by the fatuousness of the remark. now playing Claire's Knee (1970) -- (Movie Clip) It's A Secret Recipe. Possession for him adds nothing to desire.”. This fifth Moral Tale follows the pattern of the others in showing a man already committed to one woman tempted by another, only here Jérôme’s absent fiancée has two teenage rivals. As Laura, the pawn who refuses to be one, the precocious, bushy-haired enchantress Béatrice Romand is one of Rohmer’s greatest finds. It is the fifth movie in the series of the Six Moral Tales. Having had her own amorous leanings toward younger men, Aurora will thereby enjoy from a writerly distance those feelings—acted upon or held in check—she herself has experienced. With a breathtakingly sunshine-drenched cinematography, director Éric Rohmer offered enormous visual aids to compensate for the lack of any plot developments on screen. Possibly she will be fresher and more interesting, less chock-full of ready-made formulations, than he is. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. Other articles where Claire’s Knee is discussed: Éric Rohmer: …Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire’s Knee), was named best film at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and received two awards as the year’s best French film—the Prix Louis-Delluc and the Prix Méliès. In this comic vision of the great beyond, Albert Brooks finds the sweet spot between the acerbic satire of his early films and the humanism of his later work. Her mirror opposite, and eventual usurper in Jérôme’s fancy, is her half sister, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), she of the knee, one of those knockout blondes who grow less rather than more interesting with time. Free delivery available based on your order spend. The young man (Barbet Schroeder) in The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), while committed to another, is attracted to the pretty working girl but also irritated that she doesn’t have “the easygoing quality that would have eased my conscience.” Meaning: to deal blithely with the one-night stand I’d like to have. We find our sympathies uneasily shifting: Perhaps the brilliant and provocative woman is a little too brilliant and provocative—or maybe not. The picture won the 1971 Louis Delluc Prize. It is Laura who articulates the first principle of the Rohmerian world, the connection between outer and inner selves, when she replies, “But the character shows in how a person looks.” (“Perhaps style is more important than beauty,” says one woman to another in La collectionneuse, as they puzzle over what it is in a person that pleases them.) Through her he meets an intense teenager, Laura, and then lusts after her sister, Claire. Possession for him adds nothing to desire.”. As with all the films of Eric Rohmer, "Claire's Knee" exists at levels far removed from plot (as you might have guessed while I was describing the plot). Nevertheless, through him we see some part of ourselves, image fetishists, drawn perversely to glittering but unsuitable love objects, fixating on the part at the expense of the whole. A corollary of this, and one of the great delights of the movies—nowhere more in evidence than in Claire’s Knee—is the relationships among the women. In some movies, people murder each other and the contact is casual; in a work by Eric Rohmer, small attitudes and gestures can summon up a university of humanity. made, imagines its terrible and wonderful consequences. Find movie and film cast and crew information for Claire's Knee (1970) - Éric Rohmer on AllMovie. By marrying the glamour of golden-age Hollywood to a quicksilver formal daring influenced by a wide range of artists, the Hong Kong auteur became one of the coolest and most beloved filmmakers in the world in the 1990s. Glancing at a photograph of the fiancée, Laura says the boyish-looking woman is not what she would have expected. Funny enough, Claire's outlandish but imaginative stories of how she hurt her knee started to grate on me after a Rereading it as an adult, I'm still captivated by the colours but I also really enjoyed the background details of suburban England and was impressed to find a little racial diversity in amongst the friends Claire encounters. He and his lady friend’s repeated breakups and accidental reencounters have come to feel like predestination, always an important theme in Rohmer; what’s more, the pair are amicable and nonpossessive, they get along—a seriously unromantic view of love that repels Laura even as she despises what love does to her. His characters muse, reflect, analyze, insult, tease, provoke, skirmish, flirt, philosophize, lie, in an endless round of glittering verbal maneuvers that constitute the late twentieth century’s most literate tales of love, our latter-day. The mother and daughter in Claire’s Knee enjoy a bickering, loving, and mutually supportive (and acutely observed) relationship that is at the heart of Laura’s healthy and original sense of herself, and her need to stay sane. . Claire's Knee, it need be said immediately has not so much to do with the pretty girl's knee as it has to do with the protagonist's self-perception. Maybe the lesser woman, the “safe bet,” entails the subordination of one’s immediate desires to some greater ideal, a beyond-the-self. But then Claire joins the group, and one day while they are picking cherries, Jerome turns his head and finds that Claire has climbed a ladder and he is looking directly at her knee. Before Claire’s knee, there were Bérénice’s teeth! Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In the second Moral Tale, Suzanne’s Career (1963), the nerdy pharmacy student needs to despise and constantly belittle Suzanne (he’s attracted to her) in order to retain his male bona fides, which involve the continuing hero worship of the womanizing Guillaume. The epiphanies occur when the moral and the physical intersect, when the stubborn integrity of a character suddenly bursts furiously forth, irradiating the face and the landscape with the force of a revelation. That it is among Rohmer's most recognized films is a disappointment -- it lacks the unique genius that we found in La Rayon Vert and more notably in Love in the Afternoon. Jerome appears contented with life as he's recently become … Claire's Knee (French: Le Genou de Claire) is a 1970 French drama film directed by Éric Rohmer. This piece was originally written for the Criterion Collection in 2006. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male. Laura, the mother’s girl who has grown up fatherless, and Claire, a daddy’s girl, are half sisters who might have hated each other but have come to live in close and … And of the six tales, none seems more indigenous to cinema than Claire’s Knee (1970), the joint in question, that of a pretty blonde teenager on a ladder, becoming the fulcrum of an exquisite dissertation on the perversity of desire. On lakeside summer holiday, a conflicted older man is dared to have a flirt with two beautiful teenage stepsisters despite his betrothal to a diplomat's daughter and the fact that the girls have boyfriends. He’s as interested (almost) in mothers as in ingenues. Get info about new releases, essays and interviews on the Current, Top 10 lists, and sales. Or maybe it doesn’t. The mother and daughter in Claire’s Knee enjoy a bickering, loving, and mutually supportive (and acutely observed) relationship that is at the heart of Laura’s healthy and original sense of herself, and her need to stay sane. Whilst Laura attempts to flirt with him, his fantasy becomes focused on wanting to caress Claire's knee. Synopsis by Hal Erickson. The idea and the image are one, forever circling and intertwined in these exquisite meditations on the anomalies of attraction, which seem to be all about the female of the species, even when the central figure, the desiring and rationalizing protagonist, is male. French diplomat Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), on a resort vacation, meets Claire ( Laurence De Monaghan ), the teen-aged daughter of a friend. When they all become aware that Laura has fallen in love with the older man, Jerome encourages her in a friendly, platonic way. title details and video sharing options. Claire's Knee subtitles. Through her he meets an intense teenager, Laura, and then lusts after her sister, Claire. Themes › Action; Comedy Drama ... Claire . “Why would I tie myself to one woman?” asks Jerôme in Claire’s Knee, though he plans to marry a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Michèle Montel. In those films what characterized Rohmer's filmmaking was a detachment from … Jerome encounters Claire and the other characters in the film during a month's holiday he takes on a lake between France and Switzerland. And since my first two viewings I have gone back to both My Night at Maud’s (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) and Claire’s Knee (Le Genou de Claire) on several occasions. This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist, The Story of Who We Are: Gregory Nava Helps Celebrate Selena’s 50th Birthday, Thumbnails Special Edition: Gregory Nava's Selena, The Brilliance is in the Details of HBO’s Riveting Mare of Easttown. Other directors—indeed, male artists in general—when free to express their own sensibilities, almost can’t help foisting their neuroses onto women: they give us femmes fatales who bear the burden of male sexual guilt, pathetic victims whose humiliation provides a salve to the male ego or a target for his rage, idealizations whose beauty confirms their discoverers’ own good taste. Claire's Knee is about desire, which is a timeless theme, and about how we justify acting on our desires, which is a very timely one. Based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, Éric Rohmer’s bold, early short is a tale of obsession that feels distinctly more sinister than his later films. In Claire's Knee, Jean-Claude Brialy plays a diplomat named Jerome Montcharvin, who agrees to housesit a friend's rural but lavish country estate for a month. ... Movies with storylines, themes & endings like Claire's Knee; Accident starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Jacqueline Sassard, Michael … AKA: Le genou de Claire, Six Moral Tales V: Claire's Knee. On the other, the actors seem too perfectly cast, as if they’d been the models for the characters, not the other way around, and Rohmer had used what we know and sense about them to shape roles that seem to emanate from their very skins and psyches. For some, it's the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. Claire's Knee. But in the end, Suzanne wins, because she deprives him of “the right to pity her.”. He does, and since the sexuality in his performance is suppressed, it is, of course, all the more sensuous. Claire's Knee (Le genou de Claire) Quotes Jerome: I thought to myself that every woman has her most vulnerable point. 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