Sex in the Head
The will-he-or-won’t-he game (an intellectualized version of the plight of Broadway virgins) goes on so long that the squeamish hero must be meant to be an ass. When, finally, Chloe gets him to dry her after her shower and lies in bed waiting—as inviting as a Modigliani nude—his flight to his wife is comic. Too comic for us to know how to accept the scene that follows—an expression of the love his wife and he feel for each other. We sense, however, the supreme value Rohmer places on marriage, just as we sense his condescension toward women who are available. In Rohmer’s world, people have immutable characters, and they act out what they are; “Chloe in the Afternoon” is a demonstration of what you see when you first look at Frédéric, still boyishly handsome but already puffy-faced, repressed, sullen from rectitude. There are no surprises in him; he will do everything up to that. Chloe is a danger that he runs from.
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The picture’s only achievement is that it goes on so long it gets funny. The prolongation of Frédéric’s miserable indecisiveness makes the audience laugh at him in impatience. Infidelity in the head—unconsummated infidelity—makes a man seem queasy, unmanly. We are meant to laugh. There’s nothing else to do, because Rohmer’s cool game excludes any issues more earthshaking than how long Frédéric can go on stewing before a decision is forced on him. There are, however, small gambits to keep us perplexed: Frédéric tells Chloe he hasn’t talked with anyone so much in years; does he actually have this rapport with her (we don’t see it), or, even if he only thinks he does, does this mean that he feels something has been missing from his life? Is he suffering from a little bourgeois angst? We have no way of answering such teasers. Rohmer plays the role of observer, but his neutral objectivity is totally superficial—an affectation. He’s created a situation with nothing under it.
-Pauline Kael
