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Chloe in the Afternoon brings to a close Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," a series of intricate and elegant miniatures that also includes My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee. Chloe shares with its predecessors the same severe geometry of plot, the same wry seriousness about the torturous business of the heart. The hero is a married businessman named Frederic (Bernard Verley) who lives a quiet, bookish life in a Paris suburb with his pretty pregnant wife (Francoise Verley), but he teases and tempts himself with reveries of other women. Most of the film involves his flirtation with a young vagabond called Chloe (Zouzou), which begins innocently enough, then turns threatening, ruthless, potentially destructive. The tone throughout is detached and bemused, and the actors are perfect. Rohmer's is basically a writer's cinema, however, so that his films often seem cramped and static, the camera less a tool than an instrument of record. Rohmer is concerned with building the monotony of the hero's stringent life, but the film itself suffers from repetition and a sense of claustrophobia, as if we were beginning to suffocate along with Frederic. Counterbalancing these defects are the shrewdness of Rohmer's perceptions about his characters and his understanding of the subtle undercurrents of feeling that can so easily devastate the senses. He is a wily and subtle fabulist, and Chloe has much of his keenest and most graceful work.
Two English Girls will be faintly familiar to devotees of Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961). Both movies are based on novels by Henri-Pierre Roche, and Two English Girls shares the exhilarating romanticism with which Truffaut suffused his previous film. As in Jules and Jim, the central relationship is triangular, but this time the situation involves two women smitten with the same man. Anne (Kika Markham) and Muriel (Stacey Tendeter) are sisters enamored of Claude (Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of their mother's closest friend, who has come from Paris to convalesce at their cliffside cottage. The passions, disappointments and intricacies of the three-sided affair span years and remain unquieted, as in Jules and Jim, even by death. Two English Girls is the more somber film of the two. The ebullience of youthful spirit in Jules and Jim has been replaced by a feeling of almost autumnal melancholy. As the girls,
Markham and Tendeter are exquisite. Leaud displays none of the unforced charm or spontaneous feeling he had as a boy in The 400 Blows. His performance here is coy, cloying and nearly ruinous. There is also something static about Truffaut's choosing to rework an old theme. Two English Girls is an agreeably lustrous movie, but it suffers from the inevitable comparison to a great one.