Eric Rohmer-L'Amour l'après-midi (1972)

Though happily married to his adoring wife Hélène, with whom he is expecting a second child, the thoroughly bourgeois business executive Frédéric cannot banish from his mind the multitude of attractive Parisian women who pass him by every day. His flirtations and fantasies remain harmless until Chloe (played by the mesmerizing Zouzou), an audacious, unencumbered old flame, shows up at his office, embodying the first genuine threat to Frédéric’s marriage. The luminous final chapter to Rohmer’s Moral Tales is a tender, sobering, and wholly adult affair that leads to perhaps the most overwhelmingly emotional moment in the entire series. Criterion




The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Frederic leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene, a teacher expecting her second child. In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe, who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0068205/plotsummary)




The multifaceted, deeply personal dramatic universe of Eric Rohmer has had an effect on cinema unlike any other. A succession of jousts between fragile men and the women who tempt them, the Six Moral Tales unleashed onto the film world a new voice, one that was at once sexy, philosophical, modern, daring, nonjudgmental, and liberating. (Editorial Reviews - amazon.com)




A low-key, slightly creepy meditation on infidelity and adjustments to social expectations, Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) marks the culmination of director Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" series. The film, which traces the trajectory of Frederic, a married businessman, through temptation and an altogether standard midlife crisis, feels remarkably ham-handed, and fails to offer anything more than platitudinous responses to complex problems. Zouzou proves fetching as the title character, a bohemian drifter bent on seducing, and arguably transforming, the comfortably bourgeois protagonist (the dull-looking Bernard Verley); the rest of the cast, given indistinct characters to interpret, rarely provides much excitement. (–Miles Bethany - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Several scenes–particularly a revelatory encounter between Frederic and Chloe in the basement of a dress shop–do manage to catch fire, but Rohmer dodges the implications of his own creative instincts and undermines his own point by grafting on a pat conclusion that feels cheap and sudden. Lost in the slide toward obviousness is a genuinely intelligent script–one that manages to feel bright without ever resorting to cleverness–and foggy-surreal location shooting in some of the less fashionable areas of Paris. Best suited for repentant philanderers and hardcore Francophiles. (–Miles Bethany - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)