L’Amour l’après-midi (1972) - film review

Frédéric, a successful businessman, is married to Hélène.  Outwardly, they are a happy respectable middle-class couple.  Inwardly, Frédéric feels repressed and constantly fantasises about other women.  One day, his fantasy becomes reality when an old flame, Chloé, re-enters his life.  Having abandoned her boyfriend, she turns to Frédéric for moral support.  He agrees to spend time with her in the afternoon, conditional on their remaining just good friends.  Chloé agrees, but Frédéric soon realises that she is expecting far more from him than mere friendship...

Eric Rohmer brings his series of six moral tales to a close with L’Amour l’après-midi , a charming romantic comedy which is as much a conventional bourgeois satire as a characteristically Rohmeresque portrait of temptation and desire.

Somewhat lighter in tone (and also less intellectual) than the previous five tales in the Six Contes Moraux series, the sixth is also the most banal, telling a comparatively simple story of a man wondering whether or not he should extra-marital affair.  Rohmer skilfully avoids the conventional stereotypes and, thanks to sympathetic and magnificently ambiguous performances from Bernard Verley and Zouzou (who play the husband and his temptress), the film manages to be one of his most uplifting and engaging.

The most memorable part of this film is the surreal dream sequence near the start of the film, where the central character Frédéric manages to make an easy seduction of a succession of beautiful young women (including Françoise Fabian, Béatrice Romand and Marie-Christine Barrault) with the help of a flashing talisman. It’s the maddest thing you’ll find in any Rohmer film, but perfectly inserted into the main narrative.

© James Travers 2002

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