On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen KNEE-DEEP IN PROFUNDITIES BY JOHN SIMON Preconized by our most powerful auteurist publication, the New York Times, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee is enjoying an improbable popularity. Some...
...Still, if anything can genuinely attract American audiences to this flimsy film, it is that relationship, as well as the faintly perverse one with Laura, who discusses her "love life" with a kind of Simone de Beauvoirishness no American girl her age could approach...
...Absurdism has yet to be domesticated by the cinema and--because it comes too easily to a medium that thrives on process photography, and too hard for a camera that almost cannot avoid small, realistic, humanizing touches--may always be at odds with it...
...Bertucelli has directed his debut film with reverence, the amateur cast (enhanced by the lovely presence of a professional actress, Leila Schenna, as the heroine) lives un-embarrassedly in front of the camera, and Andreas Winding's color photography is low-keyed yet absorbing...
...Why she lets him do it is not made clear, but otherwise there wouldn't be even this much of a story...
...in Rohmer's hands it achieves a lack of urgency comparable only to the question of whether a fly will succumb to the flypaper or the fly swatter...
...Yet Maud did at least have one devastating performance by Francoise Fabian, and there was a measure of reality in the hero's basic problem, even if the sophomoric philosophizing on the soundtrack served only pour epater les bourgeois...
...If this synopsis suggests the heights of inconsequence, it is nothing compared to the same material strung out to feature length...
...Yet Aurora is presented as wise...
...The fact that Aurora has a man stashed away in Geneva would seem to give the lie to the remark, but let that pass...
...There is more quasi-profound chitchat with Aurora about indulgence and abstinence...
...Worse yet is Aurora Cornu, as the novelist...
...For the cultists, to be sure, there are all kinds of idiot's delights, ranging from the film's unfolding as pages from the hero's diary--with a hand-written date preceding each uneventful episode--all the way to that photograph of Lucinde that Jerome shows his friends: a picture of Jeanne Moreau...
...Finally, Claire, Laura's somewhat older half-sister, arrives...
...The film is full of such pseudophilosophical nonaphorisms, but people are so impressed with anything that pretends to be Thought coming at them from the screen that they fall over backward in wonderment...
...Laura is allowed to go on a two-day excursion into the mountains with Jerome...
...Chance offers me nothing, so I take nothing...
...Chance offers you a woman, so you take her...
...Ma Nuit chez Maud was a well-meaning, amateurish film with painfully foursquare camera placements and movements, literal-minded throughout, and with certain intellectual aspirations in the dialogue meant to compensate for the meager, contrived plot and the lack of development in the characters...
...but better its somnolence than the St...
...I am not sure that the subject, including its permutations, is worthy of a hexameron...
...Miss Cornu is a total loss where Annie Girardot or Francoise Fabian would have made luminous sense...
...Jerome now has further talks with Vincent, a somewhat girlish classmate of Laura's, who seems to nurture an unrequited lover for her...
...The Savoyard landscape is sumptuous, the living in it gracious, and even nugatory word-mongering can garner some prestige from such elegant settings...
...Or is Aurora foolishly blaming on chance a matter of temperament...
...More to the point, to take someone and to take nothing are not at all the same thing...
...As her mother, Michele Montel exudes mellow womanly understanding...
...Arkin's playing of the small part of the detective makes his uncontrolled approach perspicuous...
...And how do we get from chance to destiny, as if the two were really identical...
...Why try to fight destiny...
...Laura goes off to England on a vacation, and Jerome gets more and more excited by Claire--particularly, as he confides in Aurora, Claire's knee, which he must fondle...
...His summer holiday ending, and with Claire and Gilles reconciled, Jerome feels his craving allayed...
...Marcia Rodd, as the heroine, and Gordon Willis' color cinematography are appealing...
...Jules Feiffer has so jazzed up his already hysterically absurdist play--which, qua play, worked nicely enough--that the film becomes a parody of a parody, a hotbed of hyperboles...
...The rest are less convincing...
...to provide it with an ending, she encourages Jerome to get involved with Laura, who, it seems, has a crush on him...
...Aurora has an unfinished short story about an older man and a very young girl...
...Vitus' dance of Little Murders...
...A real-life Rumanian poet-novelist, she speaks with an accent that is an insult to French, although Rumanians used to be famous for speaking it almost better than the natives...
...While Jean-Claude Brialy makes Jerome engaging, he fails to suggest any depth in the man...
...Jean-Louis Bertucellis Ramparts of Clay is a very pure, unhokey film about how a 19-year-old Tunisian desert-village girl awakens to her need to forsake her restrictive surroundings...
...Theatrical, in fact, is what Rohmer's films usually are...
...This is still another of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," in each of which a man seemingly slated for one woman flirts or dallies with another, only to end up with the first...
...but in an age that wants its films as "filmic" as possible, you can always count on a certain eclat by going squarely against the current...
...Alan Arkin has directed with a heavy-handed frenzy that turns paranoia and its counterpart, apathy, into infantile caricature while aiming at inspired distortion...
...In Claire's Knee, however, the central theme is quirky, elusive, and finally quite trivial...
...Claire is an extrovert and happily in love with Gilles, another extrovert roughly her age...
...Nestor Almendros' color cinematography is accomplished and provides Rohmer with the flattened-out backgrounds he wanted, presumably to suggest theatrical backdrops...
...For all its virtues, Ramparts of Clay is bound to bore some people...
...She looks frowzy and bovine, and cannot act at all: repeatedly her eyes emit SOS signals in the direction of the cue cards...
...Undeniably, the film has minor assets...
...But for all its philosophizing, Claire's Knee remains dullish: not much patina on that patella...
...Not only is that whole knee business presented as if fraught with existential significance, but the very details of dialogue attitudinize themselves into a sort of hysterical pregnancy...
...Jerome leaves for Sweden and the somewhat ambiguous prospect of marriage to Lucinde...
...There are numerous conversations among Aurora, Mme Walter, Laura and Jerome about love and" marriage and family relations...
...He discovers that Aurora, a Rumanian novelist and old friend of his, is vacationing at a neighboring villa, where the proprietress, Mme Walter, lives with her 16-year-old daughter, Laura...
...Some of the box-office onslaught can be explained by the success of Rohmer's previous film, My Night at Maud's, likewise puffed way beyond its slender deserts by the two resident auteur critics of the Times...
...And why would chance make such distinctions between two worldly persons...
...This is too bad because Aurora and Jerome are meant to embody that sophisticated, playful, satisfied but not satiated relationship between cultivated ex-lovers--an easy affection that can go toward intimate friendship or fleshly intimacy with equal unconstraint...
...Take Aurora's reply to Jerome's concern over her "zero" love life: "I'm like you mon cher...
...Jerome, the 35ish French consul to Stockholm, is spending a summer month at the Lac d'Annecy in Haute-Savoie near the Swiss border, an Alpine paradise for the leisured and sometimes bored...
...But Rohmer's triviality is unlike anyone else's: On the one hand, it is shot through with unprepossessing little kinkinesses...
...The would-be cinematic openings-up of the play lead to irrelevancies or aridly humorless afterthoughts--as well as to a Central Park idyll that contradicts the central thesis...
...He bids adieu to Aurora, who, it emerges, is engaged to a man in Geneva...
...Aurora and Jerome, in particular, chatter endlessly about love, and conduct a kind of platonic amitie amoureuse...
...He is selling his delicious villa and, next month, will go back to Sweden to marry Lucinde, a woman journalist he has been living with happily for some time...
...when, finally aroused, he kisses her, her infatuation has already waned, and" there are no further developments...
...As Claire, Laurence de Monaghan contributes a trim little figure and not much else--even her knee seems hardly worth genuflecting to...
...everything else, including Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, is closer to appalling...
...the women face loveless marriages and pitifully waste away...
...It is told almost without words by means of understated but compelling images of the suffocatingly monotonous and arduous life in the desert...
...on the other, it demands to be taken seriously, as though it were full of subtle perceptions and grave pronouncements...
...Beatrice Romand, as Laura, conveys the Gallic gamine to perfection, down to the smugness that gives the charm a bitter aftertaste...
...Caught in a storm with Claire (who, generally, ignores him), he tells her about a peccadillo of Gilles' with another girl, rather exaggerating it...
...He makes the girl weep and, by way of consolation, is able to caress her knee...
...The men of the hamlet are exploited by the city capitalists, and, when they refuse a wage cut, are harassed by the Army...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 6
