Word: kneeing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...knee, actually. Or so says Author-Director Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud's). As always, Rohmer remains resolutely out of style. People go to bed and talk-only talk-the whole night through. The quarry always contrives to keep the pursuer in view. Politesse is stressed; sexual desire hovers about conversations, but some things are just not spoken in mixed company...
...Claire's Knee, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a 35-year-old diplomat, is about to marry his longtime inamorata. Before the wedding he makes a nostalgic trip to provincial Annecy, where he spent his boyhood holidays. There he meets an old friend, Novelist Aurora (Aurora Cornu) and two jeunes filles en fleur, Laura (Beatrice Romand) and Claire (Laurence de Monaghan...
...unmistakable. She is the most erotic film teen-ager since Lee Remick's drum majorette in A Face In the Crowd. But Jerome is a creature of such intellectuality that lust comes to him in whispers. It is not Claire's torso that he craves. Only her knee. In time he manages to palpate the beloved object...
Such a minor conquest might recall Critic Percy Hammond's snipe at chorus lines: the knee is a joint, not an entertainment. Yet Rohmer's mandarin tact edges Claire's Knee close to philosophy. The acting reminds one of water spiders, which manage to stay on the surface by never being still enough to sink. Nestor Almendros' photography, with its floating summer vistas, is Proust's Combray come to life. When Aurora suggests that Jerome has become one of her fictions, he seems so, obeying impulses that originate from a mind...
Claire's Knee is, essentially, an opalescent homage to M. Marcel Proust. As 19th century Russian fiction is supposed to have tumbled from Gogol's Overcoat, modern French films have risen from Proust's Remembrance. Proust's work is clustered with optical allusions, accounts of the distortions of love in the fourth dimension of time. In its way it was the end of a line that could not be continued on the page-that needed the liberation of the camera. Directors such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt...