Tuesday 24 February 2015

Love In the Afternoon

I watched Eric Rohmer's 1972 film Love In the Afternoon yesterday and the first hour of bedtime last night was spent pondering the question whether Bernard Verley's character (pictured below) would stray from his wife again or whether his dark afternoon of soul had finally scared him straight ? I tend to lean towards the former, perhaps because I don't particularly like Frederic by the end of the film. One aspect of the film I enjoy is how my opinion of the two lead characters mutates over the course of the film - at the beginning I like Frederic - I like his life, his smart, beautiful wife, his young family, his legal business (his secretaries!). In contrast, I find Zouzou's Chloe troublesome, like an agent provocateur to be carefully managed. But by the end of the film, my allegiances have shifted - I very much like Chloe and am sympathetic to her needs, while I find Frederic rather pathetic... Incidentally, I love the film's brilliantly incongruous credit music, which sounds like an early moog workout. You hope that a check of the credits would yield a "name" (Bernard Parmegiani lent his music to Walerian Borowczyk for some of his early shorts) but Love in the Afternoon's composer, AriƩ Dzierlatka doesn't ring a bell, and there's little information to be found about him...

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