Claire’s Knee

There’s nothing in Rohmer’s body of work quite like the conversations that take place throughout this lakeside morality play between Jerome, an engaged diplomat, and his confidante, an ironic, rueful novelist played by Rohmer’s own close friend Aurora Cornu. Their debates center on Jerome’s infatuation with the two teenagers he finds himself living near while his fiancée travels abroad. Laura is fiercely intelligent, friendly, outgoing, and unwilling to be used. It’s her quieter, more sullen sister, Claire, however, whom he eventually gravitates toward with predatory interest. (On the film’s release, one reviewer compared him to a fairy tale wolf.) The two older characters spend much of the movie picking apart Jerome’s sinister motives, providing an unpredictable, running critical commentary on the rest of the movie’s action. Among Rohmer’s most iconic movies, Claire’s Knee is also one of his most troubling and ambiguous—in which it’s tantalizingly hard to tell where the director’s sympathies lie.