Chloe in the Afternoon (L'amour d'apres midi)

viewed September 18, 1999 on video

From my conversations with others who've seen his work, one either loves or hates Eric Rohmer.  You either take his movies or leave them; they are what they are, and they certainly aren't ashamed for themselves.  One lady who voiced her detest of his films most vocally to me hated them for being bourgeois.  That's like hating a chicken for having feathers.  Sure, Rohmer is trapped in the middle class, but he knows it, and at least he has the brains to stick with the subjects he knows intimately and squeeze his mind for all of the insight he can lend us about the petty triumphs and tragedies of comfortable living.

Chloe in the Afternoon is such a film that knows what it's about and has a lot of fun exploring its subject.  The other two films I've seen of his, Claire's Knee and Pauline at the Beach, are perhaps more complexly structured and effortless in feeling, but for now I prefer Chloe because it seems more earnest about what it wants to address.  It is most straightforward in its first act, when Frederic, the supposedly self-assured businessman, confesses to the audience his feelings of desire for women he sees randomly throughout his daily routine.  He even shares his lovely fantasy with us of having a magic medallion that can make any woman fall for him.  We then see him walking up to women on the street, one at a time, and with a glance at the medallion, each whisks away with him offscreen.  And that's all we see.  Anyone who has seen A Clockwork Orange knows that this is not the most outrageous sexual fantasy committed to celluloid.  How wonderful that his well-behaved erotic fantasies merely underline his prudish nature

Why do I love this movie?  Because it shows how honest a man tries to be with his own feelings and fantasies towards women, and then it exposes his honesty as a mere front, his way of rationalizing his repression.  That repressed desire is put to the test when Chloe, a girl from the past, whirls back into his life, out of money and luck and in desperate need to put her life together.  Frederic does what he can, helping her find a room to stay and a job to pay the rent, and in return Chloe expresses her gratitude -- and unrequited love for him.  From the look on his face it seems that Frederic gets a rise from the attention while dismissing it as further fickleness from the unstable Chloe.  Things do get serious, though gradually, in that special way in Rohmer's films; the tension rises with the lightness and patience of a souffle.  It is the sign of a master director on top of his story and style.

The images of women in this movie serve the same function as soft-core porn; tantalizing yet more sweet than sinful.  The secretaries who work in Frederic's office are perhaps the best small touch of the film; when they're not hovering like ripe fruit over the men as they serve coffee, they're whispering with sly smiles whenever Chloe whisks into Frederic's office.  Their presence at times is ethereal; they are like nymphs or fairies, tantalizing and taunting the hapless moral vagabond for his forbidden desires.

Chloe in the Afternoon is the sixth and last of Rohmer's Morality Tales film cycle.  What Rohmer has to say about adultery is slippery; though the end is supposed to come off as a triumph, it has a tinge of defeat.  Frederic's retreat from Chloe and back to his wife to me seems more an act of cowardice than morality, or rather, his morality is sparked from an inability to overcome his own prudishness.  He's afraid of having a wild woman in his life, because he's not up to the challenge.  Chloe is basically everything that bored affluent men desire in women: energetic and driven yet neurotic, missing that paternal guidance that lures men's egos.  When he sees Chloe naked, he sees that void beckoning him, and he's scared to death that it will swallow him whole.

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