Review of Claire's Knee (1970) by Vítor M — 21 Sep 2013

Perhaps only the French would concoct a movie about a summer place (around a lake) where a 35-to-40 year old man about to get married discusses the possibilities and implications of an affair with a teenage girl.

Perhaps only Eric Rohmer would make such a movie. The film itself is chaste but evocative. Jerome stumbles into the plot because he runs into his friend, Aurora, a writer, who is lodging with a single mother of two teen girls (from different fathers, although it matters not).

She wants to experiment with an idea for a novel (about an older man and a teenage girl). The acting of the principals captures the right blend of awkwardness, especially for Jerome who is very out-of-place at times in the young person's world.

Of course, in a somewhat Bunuellian (or Nabokovian) fashion, the film becomes focused on Claire's knee as an object of desire. What would be the various meanings or effects of a gentle touch of that knee? A film that unwinds through talk that seems natural enough, though literary in scope, and which pulls you in through the ordinary suspense created when we wonder what people will do when they have moral choices to make.