Claire's Knee

The fifth of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales and the one that made him internationally famous. It took the Louis-Delluc prize, the Prix Méliès and the Grand Prix at San Sebastián, and the American critics named it best film of the year — an unusual result for a French film about a man thinking about a knee.

Jérôme, a diplomat played by Jean-Claude Brialy, is spending a final summer at his house on Lake Annecy before marrying a woman we never meet. Aurora, a novelist and old friend, is staying nearby and treats him as material, encouraging him to notice his own responses to the two teenage daughters of her landlady. Laura, sixteen, is precocious and interested. Claire, older and indifferent, is the one he cannot stop looking at, and the desire concentrates itself absurdly on a single joint. Néstor Almendros shot the lake in high summer colour, and Rohmer holds the whole thing in conversation.

The film is frequently misread as endorsing its protagonist. It does the opposite: Jérôme narrates himself constantly, describing his own motives in flattering terms while the camera records something considerably less noble, and Aurora's function is to keep asking questions that make him look worse. It is a comedy about a man who has convinced himself that self-observation is the same as self-knowledge, and it is merciless.