film

The great French director Éric Rohmer loved a film series, and Love in the Afternoon (L’Amour l’après-midi, 1972) is the final entry in his Six Moral Tales package, which started 10 years earlier with The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The most quietly unsettling of the series, Love in the Afternoon focuses, in kind with the other works in the series, on a man who believes himself to be principled and rational until he is confronted with temptation.

Frédéric (Bernard Verley) is a married Parisian professional, content with his wife and young child but increasingly haunted by fantasies about being with other women. His reveries are abstract until Chloé (the model and actress Zouzou), an old acquaintance, re-enters his life and starts to test the boundaries of his self-image. Rohmer explores male restlessness with typical understated elan, with the routines of Parisian life to the fore and the plot playing out largely through conversations rather than physical action.