Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8238 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-10-28
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee is one of his series of "Moral Tales", though it deals delicately with areas of intense moral ambiguity rather than in any obvious certainty. Jerome, a man holidaying at the very end of his youth, allows his old friend Aurora to co-opt him in her experiments with the hearts of two teenage girls. Sensitive gawky Laura fixates on him, but knows enough to realise he is dangerous to her, whereas Claire, for whom he develops a vague obsession, largely ignores him as a sexual being. He develops elaborate theories in justification of what he does and says, and the film does not dismiss these theories, while allowing for the possibility that Jerome is nothing but a manipulative self-deceived letch. This is a movie with a delicate visual palette; Nestor Almendros' elegiac camera work constantly makes clear that for all the characters this is a summer vacation with consequences. It is also a conversation piece in which almost nothing happens--the most Jerome ever allows himself is to stroke Claire's knee--and the interesting thing is how all the intense talk and extended scenes of one-to-one dialogue make that quite enough to sustain our fascinated interest. --Roz Kaveney

Special Features
French
Region 2
Dolby Digital French
Dolby Digital
English

Synopsis
In Eric Rohmer's CLAIRE'S KNEE, Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a handsome diplomat on vacation in the scenic Alpine village of Talloires, is coaxed into doing a strange favor for his friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a novelist working on a new book. Echoing Vladimir Nabokov's novel LOLITA, in which the writer Humbert Humbert falls in love with a budding 13-year-old girl, CLAIRE'S KNEE makes Jerome the researcher for Aurora's novel about an older man who seduces a teenage girl. Jerome and Aurora create mischief together as two friends in their mid-30s who are reminded of their own sexual appetites by watching the teenage sisters Laura (Beatrice Romand) and Claire (Laurence De Monoghan) with their young boyfriends. However, when Aurora challenges Jerome to seduce Laura, he tries but fails. Instead, he develops an obsessive desire to fondle Claire's knee, a notion both ruthlessly perverse and stubbornly innocent. Rohmer's laid-back, pensive style takes in the mountainous lakeside scenery, putting the weight of the film on intimate one-on-one discussions between the characters. With artful camerawork that captures much of the movie from Jerome's motorboat, Rohmer creates one of the cornerstones of his Six Moral Tales series, a pretty film with a naughty undercurrent and a relaxed existential overtone.

Customer Reviews

Conversation piece with a letch
Thirty five years on this playful French tale about a recently engaged diplomat's fascination with two teenage girls remains the quintessential Eric Rohmer film. Quiet torments of the mind, relationship chess and the never-ending inane meandering conversations in this movie about temptation and desire.
Some films are so bad you want to walk out on them. Once in a while though, there is a film of such unfathomable boringness that you cant possibly tear yourself away. Clarie's Knee reaches that exalted level around 90 minutes in. This is motion picture boredom.

After reading all the five star reviews on the movie poster I decided it would be prudent of me to watch this famous French movie. This is a movie for old men who spend too much time thinking about young beautiful women. This movie piles cliché upon cliché, and any claims its authors may make to its serving as a parable are undermined by the ludicrously compressed and melodramatic nature of the main actor's odyssey. But be thankful it's not longer; at 70 minutes, one may still derive some perverse pleasure from the silliness of it all.

Pure magic
How do they do it? The French, I mean, but probably Rohmer in particular. As one of the main characters says in 'Claire's knee': "nothing happened, or very little." Though they talk a lot; an awful lot. And still I come away with a foolish grin all over my face and a heart that has melted. It should not happen - the male lead is a serial philanderer who does not really know what love is, plus he tries it on with a sixteen-year old who has slightly fallen in love with him. But she (Beatrice Romand, many years later coming back to play a lead in Rohmer's Autumn tale) keeps him at arms length so beautifully neatly, playing with him in an inimitable French way... and there are many side plots, in which an awful lot is talked as well, and there are beautiful landscapes... and the picture quality is a bit fuzzy.... and still this is one beautiful, heart-warming movie. This is French film at its best: undescribable, and it works. It poses many questions (and the actors ask even more), does not give all that many answers, but it leaves me very satisfied with life and the beauty and warmth of it. Great stuff.

Not the kind of plot I generally think is likely to turn into a good movie...
The story told in "Claire's knee" is pretty strange, and certainly not the kind of plot I generally think is likely to turn into a good movie. In a nutshell, a man in his late thirties (Jean-Claude Brialy) develops an obsession for a beautiful teenager, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). To be more precise, he is obsessed with Claire's knee, and needs to touch it, exactly as her boyfriend does.

That sounds boring, doesn't it? However, it isn't. This movie isn't about Jerome, the mature bachelor who begins to believe that Claire's knee is everything he wants, or about his friend Aurora (Aurora Cornu), that spurs him to flirt with young girls so she can have inspiration for her writing. It isn't about Laura (Béatrice Romand), Claire's sister, eager to flirt with Jerome, and it is certainly not about Claire, that doesn't pay Jerome too much attention. It is a film about wanting what you can't have, and forgetting about it as soon as you get your hands on it. Moreover, it is also story about love and infatuation, and the difference between them.

Will you like this film? I think so, because even though "Claire's knee" is not one of Rohmer's best films, it is a movie that you will enjoy watching, not for the story, but rather for the conversations between the characters. This film doesn't have any answers, but it allows you to ask yourself some very interesting questions, and that is the reason why I give it 3.5 stars...

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