"Chloe in the Afternoon," the last of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," is the best of those I've seen. It is also the most fully rounded, lacking the one-dimensional tone of some of his earlier tales. It's as if he were striking notes in the previous works, and is now bringing them all together into a chord; the final scene in "Chloe" is his last comment on the series, and Rohmer is telling us to, for god's sake, stop playing games and embrace each other with honesty.

Game playing is always his subject. He doesn't approve of it, but he's become obsessed with studying it. He isn't interested in making movies about people with shallow motives and obvious personalities (which is to say, about 90 per cent of the characters in movies). Rohmer's work contains surprises. People develop in unexpected ways. We don't know how to relate to them until well into the movie; they don't telegraph their intentions.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Rohmer's characters is that they seem to retain free will. They aren't doomed, for example, to climb into the sack with each other at the end of the movie just because that's what usually happens. "Chloe in the Afternoon," like "My Night at Maud's," is in fact about an extended flirtation that doesn't get anywhere, and about the reaffirmation of an original love.

Rohmer's hero this time is Frederick, a pleasant if somewhat cool business executive who inhabits a marriage of the greatest simplicity and mutual respect. He and his wife, Helene, live like students -- not because they can't afford better, but because they enjoy the lack of bourgeois physical and mental clutter. It's one of those marriages that outsiders call "perfect."

But then Chloe materializes, right there in the middle of Frederick's afternoon. Frederick is a man who loves Paris, and who has arranged his work schedule so that he has his afternoons free for a sandwich, a little wandering, and his fantasies about the women of the city. It isn't that he desires them (although he daydreams of a magic amulet that could seduce them all), but that their beauty affirms his choice of a wife.

Chloe is one of these people blessed with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life while seeming to leave it. She forms an attachment with Frederick during a period when (he thinks) she is merely passing through. They meet in the afternoons. They flirt, but not too much. They talk.


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