Claire's Knee

Claire's Knee (Le Genou de Claire, 1970) is Éric Rohmer's drama, now available to watch online on iFILM. A French diplomat who has always let reason rule his feelings finds himself thrown by a single, fleeting want.

Jérôme is holidaying by Lake Annecy in the weeks before his own wedding. An old acquaintance, the writer Aurora, introduces him to two sisters. The younger one, Laura, falls for him with teenage frankness, which at first only amuses him. Then the elder sister, Claire, catches his eye, and the whole of his desire narrows to one absurd, almost childish fixation: to touch her knee. Jean-Claude Brialy plays a man who dissects his own attraction as if drafting a paper on it.

This is the fifth of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, a cycle where people talk far more than they act and the real drama lives in a glance or a turn of phrase. It took the Prix Louis Delluc. The film suits anyone drawn to French cinema of conversation, summer light and long pauses, where almost nothing happens and somehow everything does. Stream Claire's Knee (1970) online on iFILM.