Word: rohmer
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...Rohmer deals in sensuality as an aesthete. His camera watches events from afar. He takes all the passion out of sex and leaves the tingles in. Emotions are distilled and cooled--the stakes are never high enough, the risks never dangerous enough to justify Frederic's final melodramatic reconciliation. The moral dilemma is but a petty adulterous desire, just the germ of a story. And Rohmer strains it into artistic proportions it doesn't deserve. In the end, Frederic's irresolution makes him into less of a man. He hoards the familiar and circumscribed life he knows...
CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON is the last of Rohmer's six moral tales, and the fourth to be distributed in the U.S. (La Collectioneuse, 1967, Ma Nutt Chez Maud, 1969, Claire's Knee, 1970). In each case the skeleton of the story is the same: a narrator committed to one woman, is attracted to another, but despite her seductiveness returns to the first. In each tale the character resists the temptations of the flesh in the name of moral principle. Rohmer insists that his films are not moral lessons but reflections upon morality. His method depends on ambiguity: when asked...
...through the film, Frederic plays monster with his child by pulling his turtleneck over his head, and he leaves Chloe when he glimpses himself in the mirror in an identical pose while undressing to get in bed with her. Chloe in the Afternoon is above all a designed film. Rohmer's preoccupation with formal symmetry is reflected in his character's uncending concern with balance, the neatness of his daily existence. For all his pretensions to non-involvement, it is clear that Rohmer finds Chloe's availability contemptible, and parries her threat to monogamy...
...ROHMER HAS STAKED OUT a very narrow artistic ground, and maintains meticulous control of his particular world. Formally Chloe in the Afternoon is a jewel of a film, impeccably cut and polished. It is a movie of manners, and dwells on obsessions fit for a Jamesian drawing room. By now the question to bed or not to bed simply lacks sufficient emotional heat for all the space he gives it. Frederic's prolonged indecision is belabored until it becomes merely academic. The camera does all the stripping Frederic would like to do, yet neither ventures out of the abstract realm...
CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON is certainly an attractive film, delicately rhythmed and elegantly finished. If he has anything, Rohmer has taste, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros mutes, organizes, and understates his colors to fit the pace of the film. The camera plays over beautiful torsoes as if it were sculpting them, ironically, politely undressing them...