Chloé (Zouzou) and Frédéric Carrelet (Bernard Verley) develop a unique relationship in Eric Rohmer’s LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON
SIX MORAL TALES: L’AMOUR L’APRÈS-MIDI (LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON) (CHLOÉ IN THE AFTERNOON) (Eric Rohmer, 1972)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Nightly through September 29, 6:45 & 8:45
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales” concludes with the last work in the series, the 1972 drama Love in the Afternoon, which serves not only as the chronological end but the thematic finale as well. Bernard Verley stars as Frédéric Carrelet, a nearly perfect 1970s French bourgeois character. In his mid-thirties, a partner in a two-lawyer firm, he is about to have his second child with his wife, Hélène, played by his real spouse at the time, Françoise Verley, in her only feature film. While Frédéric seems at ease with his steady suburban life, he daydreams about other women, albeit with no intention of taking action. At lunch he goes to a café, watches all the passersby outside, and thinks (in voice-over narration), “If there’s one thing I’m incapable of now, it’s trying to seduce a girl. I have no idea what to say.” However, he adds, “The prospect of quiet happiness stretching indefinitely before me depresses me.” But he also admits about women, “I feel their seductive power without giving in to it.” But when an old friend from his past, the sexy and freewheeling Chloé (Zouzou), unexpectedly arrives in his office one day and starts an unpredictable yet exciting flirtation with him, Frédéric is forced to look deep inside himself and make some choices about his life that are harder than he anticipated.
Love in the Afternoon — which should not be confused with Billy Wilder’s 1957 romantic comedy of the same name, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, but was remade in 2007 by Chris Rock and Louis C.K. as I Think I Love My Wife — is a delightful will-he-or-won’t-he drama in which the man, Frédéric, thinks he has all the power but in fact it rests in the hands of all the women he meets, from a sexy store employee (Irène Skobline) who upsells him a cashmere button-down shirt instead of yet another drab, confining turtleneck to the two secretaries in his office, Fabienne (Malvina Penne) and Martine (Babette Ferrier), who suspect something untoward is going on, to Hélène and Chloé. Made during the women’s liberation movement, the film shows Frédéric at the mercy of all the women in his life, including those he meets on the street. At one point he imagines having a magical device that makes him irresistible to them, using it to conquer a succession of six women played by actresses from three of Rohmer’s previous Moral Tales, each described by Frédéric with one adjective: indifferent (Françoise Fabian from My Night at Maud’s), hurried (Béatrice Romand from Claire’s Knee), hesitant (Marie-Christine Barrault, My Night at Maud’s), busy (La Collectionneuse’s Haydée Politoff), accompanied (Laurence de Monaghan, Claire’s Knee), and alone (Aurora Cornu, Claire’s Knee). Frédéric is a kind of everyman, facing sin and temptation everywhere; he even accidentally catches their lovely English nanny (Suze Randall) in the buff. So he is in a constant struggle with his moral code, and that of society, while wondering if it is possible to truly love and be in love with two women at the same time. Written and directed by Rohmer, who casts no judgments on any of his characters, and photographed with a sly sense of humor by Néstor Almendros, Love in the Afternoon is a fitting end to Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, bringing everything full circle with an absolutely grand finale. (The film is being shown twice a night through September 29 at the Walter Reade Theater, at 6:45 and 8:45, in a new 35mm restoration.)
This past spring, the FIAF CinéSalon series “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film” concluded with Céline Sciamma’s 
Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s The Ruins of Lifta: Where the Holocaust and Nakba Meet is built on a faulty premise, but the film still manages to be a rather provocative and intriguing documentary. In their previous collaboration, Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance after the Holocaust, Rudavsky and Daum examined Daum’s relationship with his parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and taught Daum to distrust all non-Jews. Their latest film takes viewers to Lifta, the historic but now crumbling Palestinian village at the western entrance to Jerusalem that was abandoned during the 1948 war and has never been resettled by Palestinians or taken over by Israelis. A recent plan calls for it to be razed in order to make way for luxury villas. “Its ruins bear witness to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Daum, an Orthodox Jew, says about the village. “The story told by Lifta’s ruins challenges the narrative that I, the son of Holocaust survivors, believed in for most of my life.” Daum meets with members of the Coalition to Save Lifta, a small group of Jews and Palestinians, including cofounder Daphna Golan, Ilan Shatyer, and Yacoub Odeh. Daum also speaks with historians Benny Morris and Hillel Cohen and Palestinian lawyer Sami Arshid, who offer different perspectives on the conflict.
In 1978, desperate to become an important international film producer, Kim Jong-il, son of North Korean supreme leader Kim Il-sung, kidnapped popular South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband, director Shin Sang-ok. For the next several years, they made seventeen pictures together in totalitarian North Korea. Kim gave them complete artistic freedom while also manipulating them, trying to inject the films with propaganda that was favorable to North Korea while denigrating South Korea. “Let’s show the West what we are capable of,” Kim explains to Shin. This incredible story is told in the superb and exciting documentary The Lovers and the Despot, which plays out like a gripping thriller in the style of Argo, and it’s all true — although questions still abound all these years later. Together, Choi and Shin had made such award-winning films as A Flower in Hell, The Houseguest and My Mother, and Red Scarf. After their abduction, they experienced a kind of love-hate relationship with Kim, who became supreme leader in 1994. “I thought they were going to kill me,” Choi, now eighty-nine, says in the film. But she also notes, “It was one of the happiest times of my life.” The main controversy has always centered around whether Shin and Choi willingly became part of Kim’s propaganda machine or were merely just trying to stay alive, making the movies even as they plotted escape attempts. Shin and Choi secretly tape recorded hours of conversations between the two men, who appear to develop a real friendship. “In a way, we really hit it off. When he meets me, he leaves his guards outside. He completely adores me. There’s no way I can betray him,” Shin says on the tapes. But later he adds, “Whatever it takes I have to get out of here.”
