Many of Rohmer's films fall into series with some sort of common thread, be it seasons of the year or a particular philosophical vantage point. Claire's Knee belongs to the most famous of these, his "Six Moral Tales," which also comprises The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962), Suzanne's Career (1963), La collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud's (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972). Each of these films was originally written as a novel and transposed effortlessly into cinema, with this particular one from 1970 examining the romantic foibles of Jerome (nouvelle vague regular Jean-Claude Brialy).

An engaged diplomat, he intends to enjoy a summer at Lake Annecy framed by encounters with his writer friend, Aurora (Aurora Cornu, a real-life novelist many were tempted to presume was playing a variation of herself here). In the interim Aurora hopes to draw creative inspiration by following Jerome's encounters with two teenaged sisters, Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) and Laura (Béatrice Romand, offering one of the most engaging performances in any Rohmer film). In particular, the sight of Claire's knee on a ladder is enough to disrupt the worldview of Jerome, whose commitment to monogamy is already tenuous at best.

The tests of Jerome's belief system proved to be charming to both international audiences and critics, with a young Roger Ebert praising it as "a movie for people who still read good novels, care about good films, and think occasionally." In addition to bringing Rohmer to a wider audience than ever before, it also marked another feather in the cap of Brialy, who had recently come off of Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and would go on to many future films including The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

Not surprisingly, the young Romand had the most rewarding subsequent career of the indelible females in the film with future roles including The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) and several more Rohmer films like Summer (1986) and Autumn Tale (1998). Among the men, Fabrice Lunchini (who plays Vincent) remained extremely busy with several subsequent Rohmer roles and appearances in films like Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (1974), Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour (1984), and more recently the powerhouse lead role in Francois Ozon's In the House (2010). Less fortunate was Gérard Falconetti, who plays Claire's less-than-reliable boyfriend, Gilles; the grandson of legendary actress Maria Falconetti (star of The Passion of Joan of Arc), he worked steadily into the 1980s (most notably in Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman) but committed suicide in 1984 after an AIDS diagnosis.

Today Claire's Knee remains a fascinating object of study for film fans and critics, as captivating and ambiguous as the day it opened. Rohmer's depiction of a constellation of vivid, unique female characters has always been one of his strongest points, and it serves him especially well here with a film ostensibly about a man's plan to conquer a young girl but actually about so much more. In her essay "Claire's Knee: Rohmer's Women," Molly Haskell praises "the incandescent (and sometimes underrated) imagery--the precise locations, the crucial weather, the endlessly variable expressions of the human face and body, all those seductive surfaces that raise crucial questions about the 'morals' that are the heart of the stories and that are analogous to the spell cast by cinema itself, the ruthless geometry of choice and the royalty of sex appeal at the heart of its addictive power. " As with most of his films, the forward momentum is fueled by dialogue with the words being left unsaid as important as those that are uttered. As Haskell notes, for Rohmer conversation is a tool that "moves, exposes and conceals, shows the drama of choice as it is being made, imagines its terrible and wonderful consequences." In other words, if you're hungering to experience a meaningful conversation, this film is the perfect place to start.

By Nathaniel Thompson