Rohmer Redux
"Chloe in the Afternoon" is the sixth and last of Rohmer's series of moral tales, all of which, along with his proverbs, tales of the season, and unaffiliated movies are showing at the Film Forum in a comprehensive 22 film retrospective that opens today. The first thing anybody notices about Rohmer is that there's a lot of talk: people talk over dinner, over drinks, on the phone, in bed and on the bus, and if there's nobody to talk to, the protagonist will do a little voice-over narration. As a result, the now 80 year old director's films are more verbal than visual. In the opening minutes of "Chloe in the Afternoon," when the protagonist isn't talking, he's either reading or writing -- both not the most cinematic pursuits.

Soon enough, however, the preoccupation with words seems quite natural, and the story and characters, deepened by the additional knowledge their constant chatter affords us, take over. Frederic (Bernard Verley), a lawyer with a wife, a baby, and another on the way, and he says he "he envies nobody." And yet, he feels the constraints of his marriage, and to him the streets of Paris are full of affairs that might have been. In a hilarious dream sequence, he fancies himself in the possession of an amulet that allows him to control the will of any passer-by, a power of which his dream alter-ego takes ample advantage. The real Frederic, by contrast, is reduced to shopping for turtlenecks.