L’amour l’après-midi [1]
Eric Rohmer (1972)
The last of Rohmer’s ‘six moral tales’ and the protagonist, Frédéric (Bernard Verley), is virtually a continuation of his counterpart, Jérôme, in the fifth tale, Claire’s Knee. Jérôme, engaged to be married, claimed that he no longer desired other women; Frédéric, married to Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the father of a young daughter, explains in voiceover that, when he makes love to his wife, he makes love to all women. This is a remarkably ambiguous form of words but one that Frédéric more or less reverses when, a little later, he describes his fantasies of ‘possessing’ other women: he sees them, he says, as extensions of Hélène’s beauty – they affirm the rightness of his choice of wife. Frédéric is at pains to make clear that the itch to possess doesn’t entail an ulterior motive of sex; as a married man, he does, however, miss the thrill of the chase. Frédéric and Hélène, whose second child is born during the course of the film, live in the suburbs of Paris and work in the city centre. While it’s clear that Hélène is a school teacher, I missed hearing that Frédéric is a successful lawyer, as the various plot synopses that I’ve now read confirm him to be. He seems rather to have one of those ill-defined office jobs familiar to filmgoers: there are bosses with secretaries, Frédéric tells an acquaintance the business is expanding, he gets described as a bureaucrat – but the work being done is unspecific and there’s not much of it anyway. Frédéric has plenty of opportunity to indulge his habit of watching the beautiful women who pass transitorily through his life in the streets and stores of Paris: he spends a good deal of screen time in cafes and even more shopping. (Although he takes the purchase of clothes for himself very seriously, some of his choices hardly show him to advantage – especially a pale roll-neck jumper that’s about the same colour as his rather fleshy face.)
Frédéric is pedantically definite about the details of his routine: he prefers a book to a newspaper on his commuter train; the length of journey is just right for the amount of reading he wants to do before he’s home in the evening. Eric Rohmer, of course, devises a situation that jeopardises Frédéric’s complacency. One day, a young woman called Chloé (Zouzou), the former mistress of an old friend of Frédéric, turns up at his office. With an uncompromising wardrobe, hairdo and jawline, Chloé looks like trouble from the start. A bohemian drifter, she’s currently working part-time as a waitress; Frédéric, who’s been finding himself increasingly uneasy in the afternoon of his seemingly short working day, starts seeing her then. Chloé seems to want some stability in her life and he manages to get her a job working in a dress shop. Their conversations are personal from an early stage and they exchange embraces and kisses that are more than friendly but Frédéric evidently doesn’t think he’s being unfaithful to his wife. Chloé, however, announces that she wants to have a child and for Frédéric to be the father. Moments after preparing to have sex with her, he walks out on Chloé and returns swiftly and wholeheartedly (at least for the time being) to Hélène. As husband and wife embrace and she weeps, the film ends.
One of the startling features of the contes moraux, viewed at this distance in time, is the writer-director’s chauvinism – which, because Rohmer was an intellectual film-maker, is more shockingly dated than the chauvinism of stupid movies of the time. This is reflected both in what we see and in the writing of the characters. As in Claire’s Knee, the male protagonist of Love in the Afternoon doesn’t undress. Jérôme’s frequent changes of outfit and the continuing sunny weather made this noticeable in the previous film. In Love in the Afternoon, Frédéric is about to remove his top when he sees his face in the mirror and thinks again. (This is an effective moment: in an earlier scene at home, Frédéric also pulled his jumper halfway over his head, balaclava-like, to pretend to frighten his young daughter; his reflection takes the viewer, as well, as Frédéric, back to this.) Jérôme and Frédéric don’t, by keeping their clothes on, retain their dignity: although their modesty isn’t an explicit personality trait, it’s an expression of both men’s lack of self-release and underlines their ridiculous quality – especially in the case of Frédéric, who, in hotfooting it out of Chloé’s room, is viewed as a figure of fun. Nevertheless, the sexual discrimination in Rohmer’s exposure of flesh is striking in Love in the Afternoon: each of Hélène, her and Frédéric’s English au pair and Chloé appears naked. (In Claire’s Knee the teenage males were topless even if the camera, assuming Jérôme’s point of view, studied the bikini-clad girls with more interest.)
Rohmer’s chauvinism goes deeper in that the women in both these films are no more than a means of testing and exposing the extent of the leading man’s smug self-deception and sexual betrayal of his fiancée or wife. The impact of this different treatment of the male and female characters is reinforced by the fact that the actor in the main role in both Claire’s Knee and Love in the Afternoon is more skilful and creates a more substantial personality than his female co-stars. In an excerpt from an interview with Rohmer which the BFI used as the programme note for Claire’s Knee, the director noted ‘the advantages of using actors who have not been spoiled by professionalism’ – a description which clearly didn’t apply to Jean-Claude Brialy or Bernard Verley but did apply to Aurora Cornu, Laurence O’Monaghan and Beatrice Romand in Claire’s Knee and to Françoise Verley and Zouzou in Love in the Afternoon. At the time, Zouzou was a well-known model: as Chloé, she looks and stands like one; she may read her lines like a non-actress but she reads them unvaryingly. You’re reminded by a fantasy sequence in Love in the Afternoon that these casting tendencies persisted throughout the moral tales sequence: Frédéric daydreams about propositioning six women on the street, all but one of whom immediately capitulates. These cameo roles feature Haydée Politoff (La Collectioneuse), Françoise Fabian and Marie-Christine Barrault (My Night with Maud) and Cornu, O’Monaghan and Romand. I’m not suggesting that all these women are poor actresses: Fabian in Maud holds her own against the best male actor in any of the six tales, Jean-Louis Trintignant, but only she, Barrault and Romand sustained any sort of screen career. To be fair to Françoise Verley, Hélène’s shaking sobs at the end of Love in the Afternoon do register strongly – not least because you’re unsure if she suspects her husband of infidelity or if, as Chloé has suggested to Frédéric at one stage, Hélène has been seeing someone else too.
21 January 2015
[1] The film was released in the US as Chloe in the Afternoon, presumably to avoid confusion with Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957).
