Claire's Knee DVD

Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee is one of his series of "Moral Tales", though it deals delicately with areas of intense moral ambiguity rather than in any obvious certainty. Jerome, a man holidaying at the very end of his youth, allows his old friend Aurora to co-opt him in her experiments with the hearts of two teenage girls. Sensitive gawky Laura fixates on him, but knows enough to realise he is dangerous to her, whereas Claire, for whom he develops a vague obsession, largely ignores him as a sexual being. He develops elaborate theories in justification of what he does... and says, and the film does not dismiss these theories, while allowing for the possibility that Jerome is nothing but a manipulative self-deceived letch. This is a movie with a delicate visual palette; Nestor Almendros' elegiac camera work constantly makes clear that for all the characters this is a summer vacation with consequences. It is also a conversation piece in which almost nothing happens--the most Jerome ever allows himself is to stroke Claire's knee--and the interesting thing is how all the intense talk and extended scenes of one-to-one dialogue make that quite enough to sustain our fascinated interest. --Roz Kaveney [show more]

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