1970 ‘Le genou de Claire’ Directed by Éric Rohmer
On the eve of his wedding, on holiday on the Lake Annecy shore, a career diplomat visits an old acquaintance, perhaps a former girlfriend. Through her he meets an intense teenager, Laura, and then lusts after her sister, Claire. Whilst Laura attempts to flirt with him, his fantasy becomes focused on wanting to caress Claire's knee.
La rodilla de Claire, Six contes moraux V: Le genou de Claire, Six Moral Tales V: Claire's Knee, O Joelho de Claire, Claires knæ, Clairen polvi, Το γόνατο της Κλαίρης, Claire térde, Il ginocchio di Claire, クレールの膝, Claires kne, Kolano Klary, Колено Клер, Claires knä, Claire'in Dizi, Claires Knie, 克拉之膝, 클레오의 무릎, 클레르의 무릎, Коляното на Клер, Klářino koleno, Το Γόνατο της Κλαίρης, La rodilla de Clara, Klaros kelis, Коліно Клер, 克莱尔的膝盖, 克萊兒之膝
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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,…
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…
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…
Beauty overflows the capacity of the soul to the point of vacuousness in Éric Rohmer’s “Claire’s Knee.”
It is 47 minutes into the film’s runtime before the object of its title appears. By this time, Rohmer has saturated the viewer with aesthetic splendor through the work’s setting in the paradisiacal Lac d’Annecy in France. And yet, it is not this sweeping terrestrial beauty, but rather one object within it on which the attention of the movie’s main character comes to rest; Claire’s knee.
The fifth entry in Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” series is a sequence of what its somewhat lecherous male protagonist would call seductions, but are by any other name - temptations. Who, though, plays the seducer, is a…
In some respects this might be a better Lolita adaptation than Kubrick's actual treatment of Nabokov. Like that novel, Claire's Knee is set so deeply within its protagonist's warped perspective that no matter how vigorously your conscious mind rejects the grown man's repulsiveness, it can still be easy to get swept up in his rosy (in the case of Almendros's pink-hued images, often literally) view of things. Laura and Claire don't have the same visible depth as, say, Haydée does in La collectionneuse even factoring in that girl's youthful blankness. And yet, the two-dimensionality of many of the women in the Moral Tales is a feature, not a bug, a reflection of their status as projected-upon NPCs in the male…
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…
