L’amour l'après midi - For the first time in history, we are free (?)

In the last of his six Moral Tales, Rohmer seamlessly weaves together all the themes he has explored, raising the stakes higher and making them more urgent than ever: true love is something different from the dream of passion.

L'amour l'après-midi – Love in the Afternoon – is the sixth and final film in Rohmer’s Moral Tales series. These six moral stories began with The Bakery Girl of Monceau, reached their pinnacle in My Night at Maud’s, and now conclude with this film.

By a moral tale, Rohmer does not mean a moralizing story. What he is concerned with—time and again, in each of these six films—is the man. Amid the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, he examines what this means for him. Every man faces a conflict: there is the "good" woman who represents stability, and then there is the "other" woman, who embodies something else—excitement, passion, possibilities, mystery. How the man deals with this, how he reacts, and the choices he makes—this is what these six films are about. Rohmer masterfully externalizes the man's inner conflict through dialogue. Intellectually, they have plenty to say, rationalizing their emotions and concealing their passion; but no matter how clever their conversations may be, it is what lies beneath that truly matters—the things they wish to hide, justify, or perhaps even excuse.

In L’amour (let’s abbreviate the title for convenience), the story revolves around Frédéric (Bernard Verley), a young, moderately successful lawyer. Married to schoolteacher Hélène (Françoise Verley, then still Bernard’s wife), with a two-year-old child and another on the way, and having recently moved to a Parisian suburb, he is living the bourgeois life. But is this the life he once dreamed of as a student in the wild 1960s? Now at the beginning of the 1970s, it seems that may not be entirely the case. Perhaps he belongs to the first generation that, like many across the Western world, ultimately refuses to grow up and let go of their freedom. More on this later. His marriage is good, stable. And then, Chloé enters the scene.

Unannounced, she visits Frédéric’s office. An old friend? Not even that—the former girlfriend of a former friend of Frédéric’s. If Hélène still embodies the desires of the 1950s, everything about Chloé screams May '68. Jeans, a boyish haircut, slouched in a chair, smoking—a lot, smoking incessantly. And all of it with a brazenness that, well, it takes less to make a man lose his head.

And Frédéric’s head already offers little resistance to women in general. Because before Chloé arrives, we spend most of the time just following him. After the film begins and we are introduced to Hélène and Frédéric, we spend about half an hour with the lawyer alone.

We stand with him at the station, watch through his eyes as he gazes at a woman by the train window, walk alongside him through Paris as his voice-over reflects on the meaning of marriage, his desire for beautiful women, how every love should essentially be a first love that endures, how he enjoys the city, the flirtations. It is not about sexuality for him. Even though he sees women in all their glory, in all their eroticism. It is more about what they represent: the new versus the familiar, conquest and excitement versus safety, perhaps even the city versus the suburbs, the idea that, as Kouwenaar put it, "time remains open," that life has not yet narrowed into a predetermined path but that at any moment, something new can arise.

The pinnacle of this comes when, in the afternoon—he arranges his work so that his afternoons are free to wander the city—Frédéric sits in a bistro. He watches a woman reading, sees her glance up, sees her lover enter, and watches as she kisses him in that way that only new lovers kiss. Then he confesses that he daydreams about an amulet—one that, if he wore it and activated it, would make every woman receptive to his advances. Here, the women from the previous Moral Tales make their appearance: the Catholic woman from My Night at Maud’s is approached, Maud herself passes by, Suzanne, Claire, and he speaks to them. And they respond. They want to go with him. He fantasizes the way men sometimes do. Conquering is ultimately a deeply vulnerable act, so he skips that part in his fantasy. Until one woman—in every fantasy, reality is never far away—finally refuses even there.

If Frédéric seems odd now, perhaps even perverse, that would not do justice to the character. It is remarkable how Rohmer brings the inner world of a man to the screen with such honesty. It never becomes ridiculous, perverse, or ugly. On the contrary, it is portrayed with gentleness, with a sense of subtlety, of nuance, like the sea, the sea, which swells endlessly, just as the heart inevitably does.

What is certain is that we see here a generation caught in the midst of the sexual revolution, where everything seems possible—perhaps even permissible. Frédéric is not driven by perverse desires but rather by what will ultimately define our modern world: freedom is no longer—this is the 19th-century idea of freedom—about making a choice and then committing to it, freedom in commitment; from now on, freedom means refusing to make a choice. Keeping possibilities open in case something better comes along. Anything new could happen at any moment. But as soon as you commit, you cut off the possibility of the new. That is Frédéric’s struggle, and even more so, Chloé’s.

She cannot commit. One moment she lives in Paris, then in America with some artist, then she works in a nightclub, then as a waitress, then she moves in with a lover she does not love, then she moves again, this time to Montmartre. She imposes herself on Frédéric; given his character, this does not take much effort. And yet, he more or less holds his ground. Of course, he enjoys the flirtation, the possibilities that open up before him, but he manages to stay within certain boundaries. His wife would not be pleased, but a judge would not convict him, so to speak.

Meanwhile, Chloé and Frédéric talk endlessly: about love, about life, about sexuality, about freedom. They talk and talk, in fitting rooms, in clothing stores, or while changing clothes at home. As if Rohmer uses clothing to say something about sexuality. Now, anything can be worn—and discarded. It no longer matters. While they talk, they also try—here is where Rohmer excels—to evade, to obscure, to reveal, and to justify. What they are trying to evade, obscure, articulate, or justify varies each time, depending on the character, but this dynamic is always present.

The ending of the film is said to reveal what Rohmer has been leading up to all along. I disagree. I believe the ending of this film conveys something different than the ending of My Night at Maud’s. For the French director, these are not films that follow a formula; each film has its own dynamic and conclusion: sometimes things end well, sometimes they do not. Sometimes it is right for the man to choose safety, sometimes that very safety or rationality leads him to a life that is not truly his own. We do not know. Because that is precisely what the modern freedom he chronicles entails: the outcome is always highly uncertain. But never making a choice is impossible. Choices must be made, in the hope that they turn out well, but how they will unfold can only be known by living them—and only afterward, in hindsight, can it be said whether the choice was the right one. (Read Kierkegaard on this!)

A final word on Frédéric and Hélène. Many critics align with Chloé’s analysis—that he loves her only as an idea, but not truly. Critics argue that Frédéric leads an inauthentic life, that his marriage is ultimately a lie, a mere bourgeois convention. I do not think they are right. I believe that these critics, children of the 1960s themselves, have developed a naive notion of what love is—that only passionate love is true love. Whereas real, lasting love—the only sign of a true love—is one that endures through the complexities of everyday life. The love in which two individuals, who form a couple, always find their way back to each other. Any other love, no matter how full of fantasy, is ultimately a lesser love.

Frédéric struggles with routine, with the fact that his life is now the result of a choice rather than something still to be chosen; he struggles with the dual nature of his heart—yes, that much is true. But that does not mean he does not genuinely love Hélène. I believe he does. Rohmer understands that middle-class marriage, precisely because the novelty disappears, because passion fades and transforms into safety and familiarity, is not always easy. But even more than that, he understands—well, that is what the film is for.

L’amour l’après-midi thus serves as a remarkable conclusion to Rohmer’s six Moral Tales. It is not My Night at Maud’s; that film felt more intellectual, the discussions were loftier, the characters more sympathetic and interesting. Of course, faith also played a role there, which perhaps made it resonate more deeply with me. I think I can best articulate it for myself by saying that the film about Maud is ultimately a film about an individual, a soul, a psychology—a film about a person. Whereas this film is more sociological: about marriage as an institution, the value of family, the liberation of May '68, the free-spirited Chloé—this film is about people in a society and how they relate to it. In other (pretentious) words: if My Night at Maud’s is more Dostoevsky, then this film is more Chekhov, Tolstoy, or Flaubert.