The image of a charming twosome, slack and romantically engaged, each leaning toward the other in one of those countless Parisian cafés to whose notability the cinema has made a profound and immemorial contribution: it is Frédéric with his potential lover Chloé, a holdover from his youth having returned to say hello, to reminisce, and maybe to get something out of this long-forgotten friendship with a wealthy and successful attorney. And so it is—they are man and woman. He is there to enjoy the tantalizing benefits of a mistress without the guilt of infidelity and she, to bask in his gentlemanly largesse without the burden of a sexual relationship.
This is the life of Frédéric in the afternoons, when he has been prowling the streets of Paris on his overlong lunch breaks in a state of amorous reverie, lingering on each of the transient beauties that pass him by and savoring the thought of a freedom from the constraints of his suburb-bound marriage. Experienced at one point even in a dream-vision in which Frédéric attracts them with a blinking amulet like a mind-controlling villain on the prowl, these beauties and waifs are the alpha and omega of his actual desires, which might not extend past the pure imagining of their fulfillment.
After Chloé shows up and their relationship has long since shown evidence of a mutual desire, Frédéric starts to have serious qualms: he loves his wife Hélène, in spite of the growing rift between them helped along by these torpid afternoons of the wandering eye, the slight unspoken coldness between them, the mutual incomprehension of what their livelihoods consist in; to him these afternoons nourish her image and beauty, just as she does those of the many women flitting by in Frédéric’s perfervid reveries on the streets. It is the game and the lust of temptation, for Frédéric, that are more alluring and powerful than the real sexual outcome.
This nature of his, in large part that of an artist and a flâneur, was brought home to me by a scene whose essence is the philosophers-in-the-café aura of the twentieth century—like that in the great scene with Anna Karina and the philosopher in Vivre Sa Vie—when great minds settled down to drink in the air and discuss headily the ideas of the era. People can start to unspool their lives over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, some musky morning air and the hard, stained marble of a black-and-white checkered floor. In this kind of environment that I can only dream of—not because it no longer exists but because it is no longer as I’ve imagined that it was, no longer a 1950s place of honor-among-thieves and intellectual brilliance with trench coats and dirty ties—Frédéric and his lover Chloé sit talking about life and death.
What else could be talked about? Slightly mannish and tacking on the years like a doll gathering dust, Chloé airs some serious psychological baggage and that she has attempted suicide, that she needs only the courage to take her life and that this so-called vibrant life of the café and the brasserie is nothing to her, a waste of time, pointless. Her attitudes are fixed and so symptomatic that all she needs is a prescription. On the contrary, Frédéric feels quite different; where Chloé sees the sameness of a dull and meaningless life, he notices the sheer variety of this life in all its possible meaninglessness. He takes comfort in this variety, that different things and people and attitudes exist and that he can notice it, sustain himself with it even in the doldrums of his suburban marriage.
With the reconciled couple of the final scene of Love in the Afternoon, Eric Rohmer’s sound messages about love and resilience give way to the more admirable and the more interesting realization of an aspect of Frédéric’s personality, part of his inner nature: even to ourselves we may be blind, however intellectual or educated, and it might not have been until the final traipsing down the stairway out of the apartment building of his naked mistress Chloé that he realized what it was that he wanted, and how he would go about it. To think for a time, even in devilish dreams, but to act—especially for those that think, for the daydreaming artist—to act can be a feat that surprises.
