Rohmer’s fifth Moral Tale knows that its hero has reduced desire to an aesthetic proposition. What it cannot see is that its own camera has been making the same reduction all summer.
Working notes — Aurora C.
The subject: Jérôme, late thirties, diplomat, about to marry. Currently at the lake. Considers himself a connoisseur of women in the way that men who are afraid of women often do.
The situation: he has fixed upon a detail — a specific girl’s knee — and elevated the fixation into a philosophy. He will touch it once and be cured. He has told me this as though it were a confession. It reads more like a proposal.
The question I have not asked him: does it occur to him that she can see him looking?
I think this is a story.
| Director | Éric Rohmer |
|---|---|
| Year | 1970 |
| Runtime | 105 minutes |
| Cast | Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romand, Laurence de Monaghan |
| Awards | Prix Louis Delluc; Academy Award nomination, Best Foreign Language Film |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
In the My Night at Maud’s review, the watch-next promised that Claire’s Knee was the Moral Tale where “Rohmer’s awareness of his own structure becomes briefly, brilliantly self-critical.” That was written as an invitation. Arriving now as the subject, the claim requires narrowing: Rohmer is aware that Jérôme is slightly ridiculous. He is not aware of what the camera is doing to Claire.
Claire’s Knee is the fifth of Rohmer’s six Moral Tales, and in some ways the purest expression of the series’ organizing architecture: a man who has decided on the correct life is briefly tempted by an alternative, resists, and is confirmed in his original choice. Here the temptation has been refined to an almost abstract degree. Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy) is about to marry. Spending the summer at Lake Annecy, he reconnects with Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a novelist who encourages him to observe the romantic entanglements of the local teenagers as material for her fiction. He becomes transfixed not by Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) exactly, but by a single part of her: her knee. He wants, he explains to Aurora with great philosophical seriousness, to touch it once. Not to possess her, not to seduce her. Just the knee. Just once. Aurora finds this fascinating. She is taking notes.
The film presents this as Rohmer’s most elegant formulation of the Moral Tales’ central problem: the man who has so thoroughly aestheticized desire that he believes he has transcended it. Jérôme doesn’t want Claire. He wants the proof that wanting Claire’s knee, and resisting the wanting, can be converted into wisdom. The knee is not an object of desire. It is a philosophical instrument.
What the film cannot see is that there is no difference.
Watch the scene where Jérôme finally touches the knee. Claire is crying, upset about a boy who has disappointed her. Jérôme sits beside her, places his hand on her knee, leaves it there. She doesn’t respond. She is crying about someone else entirely. He has chosen a moment of her distress as the occasion for his experiment, and the film presents this as tender rather than predatory because Nestor Almendros’s camera is on the lake, on the light, on the extraordinary particular gold of a summer afternoon in the Alps, and everything inside that frame is aestheticized before it happens. The knee, filmed with the same attention as the mountains, is already a beautiful object before Jérôme touches it. The camera has already done what Jérôme is about to do.
The film’s blind spot is not in the screenplay, where Rohmer is too intelligent to miss it entirely. It is in the cinematography, where it cannot be seen because the cinematography is what the blind spot looks like.
This is where Claire’s Knee diverges from My Night at Maud’s in a way the prior review could not anticipate. In Maud’s, the camera returns to Maud’s face during the narrator’s monologues: she is watching him, recalibrating, pressing. The camera’s allegiance slips toward her in those moments. Rohmer’s awareness of the structure is registered in the framing. In Claire’s Knee, the camera follows Jérôme’s gaze rather than questioning it. Almendros shoots Claire’s legs with a precision that is not ironic. When Jérôme looks, we look with him, which means the film’s visual grammar has adopted his psychology without the film noticing it has done so.
Aurora is the more troubling figure, and the film handles her with a sophistication that is almost enough. She is a novelist, a woman, an intelligent observer, and she is using Jérôme’s obsession as material for a story, which means she is also using Claire as material, at one remove. The film gives Aurora this awareness: she tells Jérôme at one point that she is watching him the way she watches her characters, which should be an uncomfortable admission. Jérôme takes it as a compliment. Aurora lets him. The film frames their arrangement as an intellectual friendship between equals, which it is, in every sense except the sense that matters: Claire is not part of the arrangement and cannot be, because Claire’s function is to not know she is the subject.
There is a moment, brief and easy to miss, where Claire looks directly at the camera. It is not a Brechtian gesture. Rohmer doesn’t intend it as one. But the look arrives in the middle of a scene where she is being discussed by Jérôme and Aurora as though she is not present, and the directness of it briefly punctures the film’s composure. For two seconds, the object of the story becomes someone who might have a view on being the object of the story. Then the film moves on.
The comparison that creates the sharpest friction is our review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film about a painter commissioned to produce a portrait of a woman who does not know she is being painted. Héloïse is also, initially, an aesthetic object in someone else’s project, observed without her consent. But Sciamma builds the entire film around the ethics of that act: the painter’s gaze becomes mutual, then reverses, and the film earns its ending by accounting for what the looking cost and what it made possible. Claire’s Knee never asks Claire. The film ends at the lake, with Jérôme about to leave, his experiment complete, Aurora’s notes ready. Claire does not know any of this has happened. The film considers that a tidy resolution. Sciamma would consider it the beginning of the question.
Claire’s Knee is Rohmer’s most beautiful film and his most instructive blind spot, which turn out to be the same thing. The summer light, the lake, the unhurried afternoons: Almendros made an aesthetic object of such refinement that the moral argument at its center could not be seen. Jérôme leaves confirmed in his choices. Aurora has her story. Claire has her knee, returned to her without her knowledge it had ever been taken.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019): reviewed here; the painter who turns a woman into aesthetic material, but where Sciamma builds the entire film around the ethics of that act — what the looking costs, what it makes possible, and who gets asked.
La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, 1967): the fourth Moral Tale, made before this one but numbered after, where a man decides to study a promiscuous woman as a philosophical exercise and the film is more aware than usual that the exercise is a form of cowardice.
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