Love in the Afternoon

The last of the Moral Tales ends the series with a burst of new, disruptive elements: interludes of experimental electronic music; fantasy and dream sequences; risqué sex scenes; a married male protagonist who works in an office! Rather than a left-field departure, however, the film is a grand summation of the Moral Tales’ preoccupations and themes. Happily married with a young child, Frédéric finds his comfortable life upset when he re-encounters old flame Chloe, a confident, rootless, glamorous woman who teases him for having become so bourgeois. As Rohmer’s recent biographers Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe have put it, if the previous Moral Tales centered on men who have to choose between two women, Love in the Afternoon is “a utopia of doubling”—a dream of committing fully to two mutually exclusive courses of action. “You’ve never dreamed of living two lives at the same time, simultaneously but in a complete and perfect way?” Frédéric asks Chloe. “That’s impossible,” she tells him. “It’s a dream.” Few of Rohmer’s films critique that dream with such moving urgency.