August 23, 2010 04:00PM EDT

Retro Pick: Chloe in the Afternoon

The final film in Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series is a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of commitment and excess in a highly regulated culture.
 


Never did French New Wave master Eric Rohmer manage to narrativize his ethical concerns—actions partaken due to desire versus what is the societally condoned “right thing” to do versus what is important to the well-being of his characters—so well as he did in his 1972 classic, Chloe in the Afternoon. The plot is beautiful in its simplicity: Frederic (Bernard Verley) is a Parisian businessman. He is (seemingly) happily married with child, and his wife Helene (played by his real-life wife Francoise Verley) is expecting another. He has his life in order—he allows himself fantasies about other women, but fantasies are all they are.
 

Eric Rohmer

Then, of course, a woman from his past steps into his life—his old friend Chloe (model Zouzou), who used to date a friend of his. They begin to spend time together, typically in the afternoons, and as Frederic feels an attraction for the beautiful Chloe growing stronger and stronger, he is faced, naturally, with an important ethical decision to make.
 
What is so striking about Chloe in the Afternoon is the ease with which it narrativizes ethical concerns. We see, in mind-numbing detail, the ins and outs of married life and daily routine, and how this repetition and predictability is something of a drag on the potential for spontaneity and romance in Frederic and Helene’s relationship. Likewise, the appeal of the other woman—existing outside a world of routine or structure, inhabiting a structure that is societally forbidden, promising the allure of a cure for all problems in Frederic’s current life—is beautifully shown through Frederic and Chloe’s afternoon hangouts.



The film is a masterfully crafted ethical sermon that leaves you feeling not as if you have been preached to, but merely as if you have spied a piece of the human condition, as it were. For fans of Rohmer, this remains, for many, the jewel in his oeuvre.

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Chloe in the Afternoon plays Saturday, August 28, at Film Society of Lincoln Center, as part of their Eric Rohmer retrospective, The Sign of Rohmer, now playing through September 3.