(Claire's Knee)
Directed by Éric Rohmer
105 minutes
In French with English subtitles In Claire's Knee, Jean-Claude Brialy plays a diplomat named Jerome, who agrees to house sit a friend's rural but lavish country estate for a month. Jerome appears content with life as he's recently become engaged to Lucinde, a woman he's known for six years. He takes refuge in the fact that she is his opposite, and calms any doubts he has by reminding himself that "a woman made for me would bore me." Into this summer idyll and Jerome's predictable, ordered life come two teenage girls who threaten his faithful but passionless ardor for his fiancée. A lucid philosophical tale about the existence of "free-will", the film is, like all of Rohmer's films, largely composed of thoughtful discussions between the main characters. It's absolutely packed with humor and irony.

Plot is clearly not Rohmer's foremost concern, and it stays minimal, mostly made of a few situations. It is the thoughts and emotions of his characters that are essential to Rohmer, and his films remain so subtle that even those who love his cinema are baffled to explain what it is about his films which is so fascinating... but fascinating they are. Claire's Knee was shot by a brilliant cinematographer, the late Nestor Almendros, and the color palette in the film is a masterpiece of style and scheme. It's lush Monet on celluloid, and its visual prowess, combined with the provocative, unsettling theme, earned it the National Society of Film Critics' Best Film prize in 1971.

In an interview between Dennis Hopper and Tarantino, Tarantino noted that Éric Rohmer was one of his favorite directors. At first this seems totally out of place, but actually it makes a lot of sense. There is never the slightest action sequence in a Rohmer film, which makes it quite a bewildering comparison - but if you take out all the action sequences from a Tarantino film, what do you have left? Conversations...and actually they seem to be modeled quite a bit after Rohmer! But the content of the discussions is vastly different... Quentin's discussions are mostly about interesting trivia and Rohmer's are observations about ethics and life.