Love in the Afternoon

The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, and the film that states the idea behind the whole cycle most plainly. Frédéric is married with two children and works in a Paris office. He loves his wife and is content. But in the afternoons, walking through the city, he daydreams about women he does not know; the first section runs almost entirely on that interior voice. Then an old acquaintance, Chloé, turns up at his office. She has no job, lives without order and is the opposite of everything he has arranged. Months pass without anything happening between them; they meet, they talk, they walk. All of Rohmer's tension rests on what does not occur. Bernard Verley plays Frédéric, Zouzou plays Chloé, and by the director's own choice Verley's real wife, Françoise Verley, plays his wife. As in the rest of the cycle, a man desires one woman, chooses another, and keeps explaining the choice to himself. The most mature instalment of the series for anyone who loves French cinema built on talk. For anyone looking for incident, nothing happens, deliberately.