Le Genou de Claire is a summer film … whose only overt timeliness … is the lack on heavy religious, or metaphysical, preoccupations…. (p. 122)

Under cover of banality, Rohmer deepens his subtleties, splits his archetypes or keeps them off-stage, allows secondary readings to come to the surface….

Except for Claire and her beau—from whom nothing is to be gleaned: what they say or think or feel exists merely to excite, provoke or seduce each other—Rohmer makes his people compulsive talkers; but this time the dialogue, witty and free of epigram as ever, takes on the dual function of alternately revealing and concealing the characters…. [The] more they explain themselves to us, the more one feels they're offering a counterfeit of motives and self-deception….

There are other valid but less sunny readings to Claire. It's revealing that for the first time in a conte moral, Rohmer introduces a rapport...