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Down by the lake , 29 November 2008
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Claire's Knee
on DVD
(1970)
Starring: Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu
Director: Eric Rohmer
Certificate: 
This is the film that got me into thinking I would like Rohmer films.
It's dreamy summer vacation time in the French Alps boating on the lake. There's a precocious girl, Laura. She's 16 but looks about 12 and talks like a spinsterish maid out of an Anita Brookner novel: 'All this beauty exhausts me after a while. It oppresses me. You have to get away'.
She's into Chekovian conversation with Jerome, a 35 year old diplomat. They're off running up mountains holding hands. They sit, she leans back into him, he kisses her, she pulls away. 'When I'm in love it affects me totally and i forget that I'm happy to be alive' she's saying.
They're playing a game with one another. The game of desire and love. Not doing the game. This isn't going to be distasteful. No, talking about it. She's needing to 'enrich my experience' - and uncly Jerome is safe enough to flirt with.
Jerome is playing out this desire/love game with his Rumanian novelist friend, Aurora, too - like he were a character in one of her stories.
Only he gets fixated on - yes, you guessed it - Claire's knee. Claire is Laura's friend and Claire's has a boyfriend who Jerome doesn't like.
Jerome is analysising his motives - Chekovian stylee - with Aurora re the 'magnet of my desire', the knee: 'Every woman has a vulnerable point, the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. For Claire, in that position, in that light, it was the knee. It was the precise point where, if i could follow this desire, i would have put my hand'.
And put his hand on her precise point he eventually does, while they're sheltering from a storm, and he's upset her telling tales about her boyfriend.
Back to Aurora to give her his report he goes: 'It's the only time I've accomplished an act of pure will. I've never felt so strongly that something had to be done. It was my good deed' A good boy he's been (rather than a pervy dirty man) 'What i thought to be a gesture of desire, she took as one of consolation'. His hand magnetized to the knee, stuck on it, rubbing it - and crucially - not going off anywhere else it shouldn't. Cus then he would have been a perv, and the film would have lost all the credit it's been painstakingly banking in it's Morality Account.
So: does this film hold up? It does. Even tho the precocious girl thing is there, Beatrice Romand manages to stay the right side of charming (instead of ingratiating) And i felt captured by the languorous summer spirit; sipping cool drinks next to calm lakes overlooking tall mountains. Being indulged in Chekovian conundrums of the heart. The sun is warm. Love is young. Desire is sweet - but fleeting.
And there's a teasing little tweak going on in your in balls.
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