Le Genou de Claire

Every woman has her most vulnerable point. For some, it's the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. For Claire, in that position, in that light, it was her knee.

Director & writer: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Beatrice Romand, Laurence de Monaghan, Michele Montel, Gerard Falconetti, Fabrice Luchini

IMDB

“Rohmer’s haunting film is perhaps the cinema’s nearest approximation to Proustian discourse” stated Sight & Sound in their review. Over thirty years later, Raoul Ruiz’s actual adaptation of Proust, Time Regained, may have changed that, but it’s no less accurate a summation as there is something faintly Proustian about proceedings. The fifth of Rohmer’s six moral tales, Claire’s Knee is a beautifully shot dip into the waters of not only Lake Geneva but the notion of desire itself and how it can manifest itself in the strangest ways.

Jerome is a 35 year old French diplomat who has returned from Sweden to his childhood town on the shores of Lake Geneva prior to marriage to the unseen Lucinda. He is met there by a platonic friend, Aurora, who introduces him to the sixteen year old Laura, who develops a crush on him. But he is equally interested in her half-sister, Claire, who is besotted with a boorish lout of a boyfriend. Jerome only wants to touch her knee, which becomes the focal point of his desires.

Rohmer’s films are lessons in civilised discussion and frankness about all subjects. Refreshingly there is no nudity in the film, in spite of the constant possibilities for such disrobing, but even had there been it would have been no more offensive than the nude scenes were in his other works (Pauline à la Plage and Conte d’Hiver) as there is no place for prudishness in Rohmer’s films. It’s that very fact that French girls think nothing of taking off their tops in front of strangers that makes the symbolism of the knee twice as potent – it’s a body part like any other and, in simple terms, as worthy of obsession as any other physical attribute. Our hero is not sexually interested in Claire, or perhaps he is but realises that being old enough to be her father he wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre her into bed (as he opines earlier, “life’s too short to go around noticing adolescent yearnings”). His returning to his childhood haunts contrasts totally with the girls’ trying to leave their childhood behind. He hasn’t come back just for remembrance, though, but to see an old friend and for the landscape. “With beauty around me, I can’t feel bored” he tells Laura, but one senses he’s always on the verge of boredom. He’s come to accept that physical love and platonic friendship rarely come together and so he has compromised. He’s marrying Lucinda because, in his own words, he hasn’t wearied of her, rather than as a result of a consuming passion. At times he resembles a painter on vacation, especially in his straw hat, and when he tells Aurora that “I think I’d use Claire as a model”, it adds to the sense of his obsession. However, though we may sense his manipulation of Claire we also know that she is almost certainly better off without Gilles. She may have first been seen as a bikini babe straight from St Tropez, but she has more going for her than a nice ass.

Though Rohmer has always been the subject of a “seen one, you’ve seen them all” appraisal, his films are constantly entertaining and delightfully forthright. His heroines are not conventional beauties but have an inner beauty that is without question. If Brialy is superb as the diplomat, de Monaghan and, particularly, Romand are at least his equal as the young filles. Beautifully photographed by the great Nestor Almendros on location, it’s a witty delight, a seemingly shallow film that is in fact anything but. Rohmer believes – correctly – that there is something much more erotic about the simplest of gestures (playing with a girl’s hair, touching her shoulder, whatever) than the softcore humpings of numerous potboilers. It knows that any man who would choose as a desert island companion a honey he wants to have continual sex with over a platonic friend for whom one has affection is very shallow indeed. The omnipresent Lake Geneva is anything but shallow and neither is Rohmer’s masterpiece.

Review by Allan Fish
Wonders in the Dark

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Password: oldscot


Runtime: 105 min
Country: France
Language: French
Subtitles: English (hardcoded)
File: 1016 MB, duration: 1:46:01, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video: 1016 MB, 1340 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 720*480 (4:3), DIVX = OpenDivx v4
?????: 250 KB, 128 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, 0x55 = MPEG Layer-3
WinRar: 1.09 GB added 5% for recovery