Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970) (Patreon)

Perhaps because Rohmer knew that La collectionneuse was too subtle for idiots like me, he thoughtfully made Claire's Knee, a film that is perfectly frank about the lechery of its leading man. Jérome (Jean-Claude Brialy) is a middle-aged, retired diplomat, and that the fact that Rohmer has assigned him that occupation strikes me as significant, even though not much is made of it in the narrative itself. See, Jérome moves through the world assuming that he has a sort of blanket immunity, and to a large extent he's right. He has an unseen fiancee who doesn't particularly mind his extracurricular activities, as well as a good friend / possible ex-lover, Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a novelist who tacitly encourages his worst instincts. For her, everything Jérome does falls under the heading of fiction, even though many of his transgressions are very real.

After meeting Aurora by chance on a bridge in Annecy, Jérome comes to visit her at the lakeside home where she's temporarily staying. It's the home of Madame Walter (Michèle Montel), a rather unobservant sort who appears to be charmed by Jérome, and possibly even attracted to him. This sets the stage for the rest of the story, as Jérome finds not one but two underage beauties ripe for the picking. Mme. Walter's daughter Laura (Beatrice Romand) has a crush on Jérome, something he seems interested in exploring / exploiting, not so much out of desire as curiosity. But soon he shifts his attentions to Laura's slightly older half-sister Claire (Laurence de Monaghan).

One could read Claire's Knee as Rohmer's riff on Nabokov, with some important differences. For one thing, the "Lolita" is split in two, one who is smitten with Jérome's apparent sophistication, and another who is completely cool towards him. The fact that Laura is around 13 or 14, and Claire around 16 or 17, is of minor consequence to Jérome, except inasmuch as he lusts after Claire's somewhat more developed figure. Rohmer is really offering us a study in Freudian self-deception. While Laura is a young child, she is obviously smarter than Claire, and when Jérome makes his move she realizes that her idle fantasies were preferable to a reality in which Jérome might actually molest her.

By contrast, Claire's utter indifference only fuels Jérome's lust for her. In the film's key sequence, she and her boyfriend Gilles (Gérard Falconetti) have climbed a ladder to pick fruit from one of Mme. Walter's trees. This puts Claire's titular patella right at Jérome's eye level, and it immediately becomes his fetish object. (Did he catch a stray glimpse up her skirt and discover the dreaded threat of castration?) Claire's knee becomes a synecdoche for her youthful perfection, as well as a relatively innocent part of her body to obsess over, since it is not overtly sexual.

If Jérome's perversion were in any doubt, it's worth remarking that, with both Laura and Claire, he pursues his aims with an admixture of Lothario swagger and parental concern. Laura invites him alone on a long walk, and her mother things nothing of the two going off together because she sees Jérome as a responsible adult. And when he manages to get Claire to himself (under a pergola in a rainstorm), he cloaks his desire with the persona of a Dutch uncle, lecturing her that Gilles is not good enough for her and she should trust his age and experience.

At the very heart of molestation, of course, is the blurring of lines between adult / parental trust and authority, with the introduction of overt sexuality. Jérome is adept at using the one as a cover for the other, allowing the immune diplomat to hide in plain sight. It's even this feigned avuncular concern -- giving the crying Claire a pat on the knee -- that allows Jérome to satisfy his fetishistic craving. Upon relating all of this to the Aurora, she remains wryly impassive, dutifully noting both Jérome's recounted actions and his self-deluding rationalizations. She even seems to take a sort of aesthetic pleasure in his sordid tale, ever the writer, incapable of separating forbidden imagination from actual assault. Rohmer suggests not only that it takes a village to molest a child -- a society that defers to male power and privilege -- but that the people this tale is addressed to, us, must account for our own moral stance. 

Claire's Knee is a deeply disturbing, self-indicting work of art. It's as if Woody Allen suddenly came clean, with himself as well as his audience.