Le genou de Claire
Eric Rohmer (1970)
The fifth of Eric Rohmer’s six ‘moral tales’ is extraordinarily assured but not very interesting. Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), a diplomat in his thirties, is vacationing at Lake Annecy, where he also spent childhood holidays. Although soon to be married to a woman called Lucinde, with whom he’s lived for some time, he’s unaccompanied. (Lucinde is never seen in the film, except as a photograph.) Jérôme accidentally meets up with Aurora (Aurora Cornu), an old friend from Paris and a novelist, who’s staying in the lakeside house of a Mme Walter (Michèle Montel). Jérôme tells Aurora that, now he’s engaged to Lucinde, he no longer desires other women. Aurora, however, encourages him to test his complacency by flirting with Mme Walter’s younger daughter, Laura (Beatrice Romand). It’s immediately clear that Laura has a schoolgirl crush on the suave, urbane Jérôme; after initially resisting Aurora’s scheme, he takes Laura on a hike in the mountains above Lake Annecy. He realises that he finds her charming and although nothing physical comes of these feelings Jérôme is irritated when Laura turns out to have a boyfriend, Vincent (Fabrice Luchini), of about her own age. Laura leaves for a stay in England shortly after her elder half-sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) returns home – she too has a contemporary boyfriend, called Gilles (Gérard Falconetti). Jérôme becomes possessed by desire not for the whole Claire, however often he sees her slender body in a bikini, but only for her titular right knee. Aurora tells him he should touch Claire’s knee in order to exorcise his fascination for it and this is what Jérôme eventually does. It happens when he gives Claire a lift to Annecy in his motorboat and they have to take shelter en route from a rainstorm that suddenly breaks the glorious summer weather. Aurora is right: Jérôme’s physical contact with the object of his desire breaks the spell.
One of the strongest bits of Claire’s Knee is its ending, when Jérôme‘s month-long holiday is over and he’s departed the scene. He has left in a state of renewed self-satisfaction, not least because the knee-touching occurred when Jérôme was comforting Claire, who began to cry when he told her that he’d seen Gilles kissing another girl: Jérôme thinks he’s convinced Claire that she’s too good for her arrogant (and admittedly tedious) boyfriend. The latter calls at the Walter home shortly after Jérôme has left. A tearful Claire rows with Gilles, who explains how he came to be kissing someone else. Aurora at first watches the youngsters, curious to know what will happen next, but she then disappears from the screen. Claire and Gilles are the last characters we see and, as they sit together on a bench by the lake, they appear to be reconciled. It’s as if the various controlling influences of the film that we’ve been watching – Aurora, Jérôme, Rohmer himself – all now have had to let go, to let others’ lives continue independently. This trio’s control is increasingly claustrophobic, which is why the conclusion of Claire’s Knee has impact. Rohmer may be represented, in different ways, by both Aurora and Jérôme. She, the writer, analyses the motives of characters in the scenario that she creates and defines their roles, until the people actually involved take over; the self-analytical Jérôme is interested principally in his own feelings and his capacity to manage them.
Jérôme is somewhat troubled by his fascination for the knee but somewhat is the operative word: Eric Rohmer seems not to do extreme feelings. Jérôme’s motorboat hums daily up and down the lake, barely creasing the water. The surface of the film remains similarly undisturbed – in fact there’s little suggestion of turbulence at any level. Claire’s Knee is very wordy, especially in the conversations between Jérôme and Aurora, but its appearance and the atmosphere that this creates are no less crucial to the texture. The summer landscape, as visualised by Nestor Almendros, is sensuous but also stifling – the fact that all the characters seem to be written as the same voice intensifies this effect. Although Laura, Claire and their boyfriends go about in bikinis or shorts, Jérôme is always fully clothed, to emphasise (I assume) his willed objectivity and borderline voyeurism, and Eric Rohmer plays amusedly with the movie convention of the sexy storm: even when a thunderclap breaks the drought and it pours with rain, the physical contact between Jérôme and Claire doesn’t go beyond his caressing of her knee. The expert Jean-Claude Brialy and the vivid Beatrice Romand are standouts in a cast whose playing reinforces the prevailing becalmed quality of Claire’s Knee.
19 January 2015
