His attitude to women in general was poor, I thought. That he was willing to play games with a young girl who he believed to have feelings for him was creepy, surely? I agree with Miss Vicky that he was unattractive. That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the quality of the film, it's just an observation, and I don't think it's entirely irrelevant in the discussion of a film which has to do with attraction.
I'm not sure what being foreign has to do with it.
Although it was interesting how he several times said to Aurora how 'young' she still was, as flattery, as though youth is the most prized quality in a woman.
Most of his pursuit of Claire and her knee was more pathetic than creepy, it's increasingly embarrassingly obvious (although perhaps not to Jerome) that he is far too old to be chasing after her and can't compete with the young men.
Is he creepier than Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer? I think his reasons for pursuing Claire are partially derived from the same things that derive the entirety of that film, but another aspect of it is far more sinister.
Like I said before, I don't think it being foreign (or from the 70s really) needs to be very formative of our understanding of the characters.
But the experiment itself is trivial and dull. I think even she recognises that in the end. Unfortunately that has a knock on effect on how interesting the film is. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was like watching paint dry, but I found it difficult to be interested in the of perpetually bored characters who seem to lack genuine emotions.
I think the experiment, if it was one, was definitely trivial, but certainly not dull. It basically causes Jerome to question some fundamental things about himself, and cause him to feel things that he doesn't understand. He begins to lose understanding of who he is and also the boundaries of societal morality.The way he deals with this in the end could be considered lackluster (except in the case of Claire), but that just seems to me like the logical end result, and anyways the journey through it I found fascinating in watching how other people understand themselves.
I'd be interested to know more about why these films are considered as 'moral tales'.
I know that it's not exposition, but I still find characters retelling things we have just seen happen, expounding on their own lack of emotions and psycho-analysing themselves to be wearing.
I'll answer these two together because they're interconnected. Rohmer's Six Moral Tales (beginning with The Bakery Girl of Monceau, and ending with Love in the Afternoon) are films based off of the same basic plot structure, inspired by Sunrise. A man who is in a relationship is tempted by another woman, but returns to the original woman. What this means in Claire's Knee is much more concrete than in other films (in My Night at Maud's, the only connection the main character has with the first woman is seeing her and idealizing her first). In addition to the basic plot, each film is told from the perspective of a single male character.
The meaning of calling them Moral Tales is not that they are films that expound morality, but rather that they are about the various ways in which we construct a moral system for behaving. Each film is about the way in which one man rationalizes and justifies his actions according to his own, individual, "moral system." In that way I don't think these films are about emotions (though some are) but rather about how the self is constructed, and how we (meaning both the audience and the characters) attempt to understand it.
Reply to Topic
