Claire's Knee

Laura and Jérôme 

Well!  I want to own shoreline property on Lake Annecy in the French Alps.  I want to spend long languid days chatting with witty and perceptive friends.  I want a motor boat on which I can buzz around the lake.  I want to be a kid in my 20s or 30s.  I want to walk with someone whose company I like across high mountain pastures.

I might even wish I were French!

I'm not so sure, however, that I'd obsess over the knee of a teenager.

Claire's Knee (1970) is the fourth in this year's SAM film series, exhibiting the films of director Éric Rohmer.  It is the fifth in that director's series he calls his "Six Moral Tales."  It is a beautifully filmed and witty comedy, with, as always, an undercurrent of serious questions.

Jérôme is an urbane diplomat, bearded, perhaps in his upper thirties, who is visiting his former lover and old friend Aurora.  Aurora is renting a house on Lake Annecy.   The owner is an older woman who travels on business, and who has left her two teenage daughters, Claire and Laura, in Aurora's care.  Jérôme is shortly to be married to a woman in far-off Sweden, a woman whose aspect in a photo appears somewhat tense and severe. 

Jérôme and Aurora are completely relaxed together.  The romance is long past, but they display constant affection, hugging, holding hands, leaning together.  Aurora is a writer.  She tells Jérôme that she does not create her characters out of nothing, but based on her observations of the people she knows. 

Laura appears while they talk.  Laura (Béatrice Romand) is one of the most appealing film characters I've seen in recent years.  She appears no more than 12 or 13, but is actually 16, and played by an actor who is 18.  She is gangly, awkward, not shy in the least, funny, tom-boyish, and a young woman with opinions on virtually everything -- opinions she is happy to share with anyone who will listen.  It quickly becomes apparent that she has a crush on Jérôme.  Boys my own age are boring, she tells him.  I've never actually been in love.  I really prefer older men.

She looks at a photo of Jérôme's fiancée.  She doesn't look like someone whom I'd expect you to like, she says.  Jérôme had earlier told Aurora that he and his fiancée had nothing in common, and that they gave each other complete freedom to do whatever they wanted.  Their separate careers would keep them apart much of the time. Therefore, an ideal marriage, he feels.

Jérôme feels uncomfortable, but can't quite stop from preening before Laura's flirtation.  Aurora looks on amused, and tells Jérôme that he should go along with her.  Aurora had already half-written a story in her head about a man very similar to her former lover, and would like to see how this development worked out.

The movie is then filled with idyllic scenes between Jérôme and young Laura, including their wandering the high meadows above the lake, like a scene out of The Sound of Music.  Nothing physical beyond holding hands, however, and long talks with Laura's head on Jérôme's shoulder. 

Laura has a boy friend, Vincent, who looks barely older than she does.  Jérôme chats with Vincent, who assures him that Laura is just a friend.  At times, they seem a bit closer than that, but just barely, just enough to give Jérôme unwanted feelings of jealousy.

Finally, older sister Claire, in her upper teens, arrives with her handsome but bossy boyfriend.  The boyfriend Gilles is just obnoxious enough to disgust Jérôme.  He finds his attention diverted from Laura to the more mature Claire -- focusing at one point on her knee while she is standing on a ladder.  But Claire has Gilles, and Laura -- losing interest in  Jérôme -- has Vincent and her own interests. 

Jérôme finds himself alone and feeling old, while the social activities of a younger generation surround him.

Ultimately, when he and Claire are alone in a rainstorm, he tells her things about Gilles that make her cry.  To "console" her, he strokes her knee.  Nothing more.  The crisis is over, as is the knee fetish.  The girls are leaving the lake -- as is Jérôme who is returning to Sweden and his impending marriage.  He tells Aurora that touching the girl's knee "broke the spell." 

Jérôme had earlier told Aurora that he was attracted only to women who were attracted to him.  He obviously had meant nothing to Claire, in fact he irritated her.  He had enjoyed a month basking in Laura's attentions, however -- a girl who was far too young for him, but who satisfied his need to be loved and admired.  He departs the summer warmth of Lake Annecy for the glacial chill of his impending marriage in Sweden.  (Rohmer was a close friend of Ingmar Bergman, and I wonder if this was a dig at his old friend?)

A bittersweet ending, but actually a warm and sunny movie about people who enjoy each other's company.  And who, unlike characters in many films, are rarely hard on themselves -- or on each other.