The slightly misguided male of Chloé in the Afternoon is Frédéric, a young businessman who lives a comfortable and contented life with his wife Hélène, a hardworking schoolteacher who's pregnant with their second child, and their little girl. His happy marriage notwithstanding, Frédéric has fond memories of the bachelor days when he was free to embark on amorous adventures, and his fantasy life remains alive and well. It seems that fantasy could become reality when he receives an unexpected visit at his office from Chloé, a longtime acquaintance and experienced troublemaker who once drove a former boyfriend almost to suicide. Now fallen on hard times, she hopes Frédéric can help her turn things around with advice and assistance.
As the film's title suggests, Frédéric and Chloé find afternoons a convenient time to meet and talk, and soon their get-togethers become regular events. Chloé still has an unstable personality, though, going through periods of depression and occasionally vanishing for a while. Frédéric avoids adultery by refraining from sex with her. But when she decides she wants to have a child without tying herself to a husband - and yes, she wants him to be the father - their relationship acquires a new dimension that Frédéric must grapple with in a hurry. The situation comes to a head (spoiler alert) when he finds himself alone with a naked Chloé in her latest apartment. Simultaneously excited and panicked by the prospect opening before him, Frédéric starts to succumb to her lure, has immediate second thoughts, and abruptly sneaks out the back way, racing home to the safety and security of his happy home with Hélène.
When the "Six Moral Tales" were in the planning stage, Rohmer associated each installment with a different color - even the first three films, which were conceptualized and shot as black-and-white productions. The color he chose for Chloé in the Afternoon was orange, although the pastel-tinged cinematography by the great Nestor Almendros is too subtle to underscore that particular hue in obtrusive ways.
Other elements of Chloé in the Afternoon distinguish it from its companion pieces. For one, Rohmer was a charter member of the French New Wave movement that revolutionized cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, and he shared the group's strong preference for on-location filming; yet Chloé in the Afternoonwas partly shot in a studio because Rohmer couldn't find an actual locale that was precisely right for some scenes. For another, he generally shied away from dream sequences, believing that movies are inherently rooted in the present tense; alone among the "Six Moral Tales," however, Chloé in the Afternoon contains a spicy daydream scene, showing six women who materialize in Frédéric's imagination as he ponders the feminine traits that fascinate him.
Rohmer later said the daydream scene was inspired by a story he read as a child, about a man with a magic talisman that gives him an irresistible will. In this sequence Rohmer gives free reign to his own will as a filmmaker: all of the briefly glimpsed women are played by actresses from the other moral tales, and each has a key characteristic - busy, hurried, hesitant, and so on - linked with her in Frédéric's roaming mind. It's as if these fleeting cameos are Rohmer's way of reluctantly bidding farewell to the first major series of his career, much as his colleague François Truffaut did when he inserted clips from earlier Antoine Doinel films in his 1979 drama Love on the Run, his fifth and last film about that character.
Like most New Wave films, Chloé in the Afternoon is a highly personal work for the auteur who wrote and directed it. As such, it's an interesting reminder that Rohmer was more conservative in his beliefs and values than other New Wave innovators. He was intensely religious, for instance, and while his devout Catholicism is less evident in Chloé in the Afternoon than in his 1969 breakthrough film My Night at Maud's, it seems quite apparent in the finale, where Frédéric overturns movie conventions by saying a definitive no to extramarital sex before it has a chance to start. Rohmer is the only New Wave filmmaker who could so persuasively pull this off amid the freewheeling sexuality of cinema in the early 1970s.
Rohmer brought his love of revealing dialogue and nuanced visuals to many standalone films as well as the "Six Moral Tales" and two subsequent series: "Comedies and Proverbs," comprising six productions made from 1980 and 1987, and "Tales of the Four Seasons," a quartet of pictures that premiered between 1989 and 1998. He remained an active filmmaker until just three years before his death - he died in 2010 at age 89 - but none of his later work eclipsed the affection and acclaim earned by the "Six Moral Tales," which launched his illustrious career and gained him a permanent place in the pantheon of French cinema. Chloé in the Afternoon is a marvelous capstone for a marvelous sextet.
Director: Eric Rohmer
Producers: Barbet Schroeder, Pierre Cottrell
Screenplay: Eric Rohmer
Cinematographer: Nestor Almendros
Film Editing: Cécile Decugis
Production Design: Nicole Rachline
Music: Arié Dzierlatka
With: Bernard Verley (Frédéric), Zouzou (Chloé), Françoise Verley (Hélène), Daniel Ceccaldi (Gérard), Malvina Penne (Febienne), Babette Ferrier (Martine), Suze Randall (au pair), Françoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault, Haydée Politoff, Aurora Cornu, Laurence de Monaghan, Béatrice Romand (woman in dream sequence)
Color-97m.
by David Sterritt
