Claire's KneeMovies like Claire's Knee
- Key Features:
- Infatuation, Desire, Summer, Intellectual, French New Wave, Relationship dynamics, Existential, Voyeurism, Age gap
- Tone:
- restrained, poetic, serious
- Target Audience:
- Arthouse cinema viewers, Intellectual film enthusiasts, French cinema aficionados, Character-driven drama lovers
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Obsession → Reflection
Claire's Knee

On the eve of his wedding, on holiday on the Lake Annecy shore, a career diplomat visits an old acquaintance, perhaps a former girlfriend. Through her he meets an intense teenager, Laura, and then lusts after her sister, Claire. Whilst Laura attempts to flirt with him, his fantasy becomes focused on wanting to caress Claire's knee.
Claire's Knee
Frustrated by the lack of intimacy in her relationship, a young schoolteacher goes through a series of intimidating and often violent sexual partners.

Marion is about to divorce from her husband and takes her 15-year-old niece, Pauline, on a vacation to Granville. There, she meets an old love...

Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents' house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.

Middle-class Parisian suburbs: Blanche and Léa, office worker and student, meet and become friends. Léa is going out with Fabien, but is thinking of leaving him. Blanche falls for Léa's handsome and witty friend Alexandre, but is tongue-tied whenever she meets him. Léa goes on holiday and Blanche, still smitten with the dashing Alexandre, begins to get to know Fabien.

Two seemingly happily married French couples are forced to contend with a number of issues.

Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.

Frederic leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene, a teacher expecting her second child. In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe, who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma.

Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.

Marguerite loses her wallet, and it's found by Georges, a seemingly happy head of family. As he looks through the wallet and examines the photos of Marguerite, he finds he's fascinated with her and her life, and soon his curiosity about her becomes an obsession.

Lucía and Ofelia, two sisters, finally meet after 7 years of cold relationships upon Lucia 's wedding. But when Juan, Lucia's husband, and Ofelia meet, they feel like a disruptive fantasy have enchanted their minds and bodies...

A young woman struggling to stay on top of everything in her life meets a married publisher and begins an affair with him.

Vacations in the French countryside. Daphne, three months pregnant, finds herself alone to welcome Maxime, her boyfriend François’ cousin. François had to leave in a hurry for Paris to cover for a sick colleague. For four days, while waiting for his return, Daphne and Maxime get to know each other and share very intimate stories that bring them closer...

Awaiting his girlfriend Léna’s arrival at the Breton seaside resort of Dinard, Gaspard befriends—and flirts heavily with—two other women, the companionable ethnology student Margot and the sensual townie Solène, making for a rather complicated situation when Léna finally arrives.

A coming of age story centering on the exploits of a young girl during summer vacation.

Elegant, retired architect Shauna (70) crosses paths with Pierre, a happily married doctor in his 40s, who first made an impression on her in a brief meeting 15 years previously. Both are quite troubled to meet again and begin an affair. While Pierre’s family life is soon turned upside down, Shauna struggles with feelings she thought belonged to the past.

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.

Anaïs is twelve and bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. She watches her older sister, Elena, whom she both loves and hates. Elena is fifteen and devilishly beautiful. Neither more futile, nor more stupid than her younger sister, she cannot understand that she is merely an object of desire. And, as such, she can only be taken. Or had. Indeed, this is the subject: a girl's loss of virginity. And, that summer, it opens a door to tragedy.

Feeling suffocated by a possessive boyfriend, work and suburban life, a young woman starts spending the weekends in her Paris apartment in order to reclaim some of her lost freedom.

Paris doctor Catherine starts to think her husband, Bernard, is having an affair when she hears an unfamiliar woman's message on his voice mail. Hoping to learn more about his extramarital activities, Catherine heads to a strip club, where she hires call girl Nathalie to have a fling with Gerard. As the affair progresses, Nathalie gives Catherine regular status reports, and the relationship between the women evolves from business to personal.

Young provincial Charles arrives in Paris to stay with his cousin Paul while studying law. Paul is a decadent, bohemian pleasure-seeker who shows the meek, diligent Charles the thrills of city life. When Charles falls for Florence, one of Paul's acquaintances, relationships begin to shift.

From the moment they meet - and against their will - Helene and Joachim begin a lovers' dance they are powerless to stop.

Fed up with her present lifestyle, and more particularly sexually unsatisfied by her boyfriend Fred, Sandrine decides to find a new way in life. Intrigued by her friend Sophie, who tells her about her sexual experimentations, she will find, through various encounters, new pleasures and new experiences, whether physical or spiritual.

In eastern France, two teenage cousins have the summer of their lives when they paddle a purloined canoe to the far shore of a lake.

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

Claire, a school teacher with a camera is on her first visit to Cannes. She happens upon a film sales assistant, Man-hee, recently laid off after a one-night stand with a film director.

A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.

Beautiful violin virtuoso Camille has two obsessions: the music of Ravel, and a friend of her husband's who crafts violins. But his heart seems to be as cold as her playing is passionate.

An Italian high school student becomes infatuated with a woman he sees outside his class window. Her fiancée is in jail for being involved in a radical movement, and she spends much time in court providing moral support. At first she resists the student's advances, but eventually begins an affair with him. Their situation is condemned by her family and his father, who is the woman's psychologist.

A shy teenager on a summer vacation experiences the joy and pain of young adulthood when he forges an unlikely bond with an older girl.

Jeanne, a shy young woman, works as a night guard at an amusement park and has a close relationship with her mother. While no man can compete with this opposed duo, Jeanne begins to develop strange romantic feelings for Jumbo, the latest attraction at the theme park...

The professional and emotional cross-currents between two romantically entwined theater actors played by the director’s son Louis and Anna Mouglalis.

In Paris, six people all look for love, despite typically having their romantic aspirations dashed at every turn.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

A dockworker seeking revenge on the killer of his sister finds himself the object of desire for two women.

Faced with their fantasies, six couples try to explore the hidden sides of their intimate life. Six questions on access to pleasure. From role play to abstinence, via exhibition, six separate stories with the same questioning of desire today in the center.

A TV weather girl is torn between an older man, a famous married author whom she loves but who won't leave his wife, and a semi-deranged young heir to an industrial fortune who loves her.

After a bad breakup, a college-aged Parisian moves into her father's flat only to discover that he is living with his new girlfriend - a young woman her age.

A man and a woman meet by accident on a Sunday evening at their childrens' boarding school. Slowly, they reveal themselves to each other, finding that they have something deeply in common.

35-year-old Jean still lives with his mother in a small village in Corsica and works as a cook in the family's restaurant. His future, to his great despair, is all mapped out: he'll take over the restaurant. But one day Nora, a young and forceful woman, is thrown into the sea from a racing yacht. She washes up on the beach at Jean's feet - adventure has at last knocked at his door.

A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on a canal bridge for her lover's return.

In a social context deteriorated by a countrywide economic crisis, the life of several people will be turned upside down after they meet Cécile, a character who symbolizes desire.

In 1971, a young woman moves from the French countryside to Paris and begins a passionate love affair with a feminist leader.

A talented photographer who lands a lucrative job in Paris with a scandal-mongering tabloid and becomes romantically involved with an eccentric children's book publisher while resisting the sexual advances of another photographer.

Two teenage friends conspire to find out how much their youthful sensuality can disrupt one of their households, headed by a dentist and his mentally-ill wife.

A man and a woman are brought together by chance for several months. He is younger than she is, married, Russian, officially a diplomat stationed in Paris. She is a beautiful teacher and researcher, with her feet firmly on the ground. The film follows the evolution of their love, from the beginning to end.

A philosophy professor has an illicit affair with one of his students, a bright yet troubled girl who lives alone.

Hector meets Truquette on Bastille Day and becomes obsessed with seducing her. The plan is to get her to the seaside pronto. Pator is not complaining, especially if her friend Charlotte comes along for the ride. So off they go, down the country roads of a broke and broken France. Times are hard ! Suddenly the government cancels a month of summer. Everyone back to work! A wad of cash and two gun shots later, the group splits in two like France itself. But careering away from work in no way daunts the remaining trio, dead set on relocating the Bastille Girl and reveling in an endless summer.

A drama set at a Swiss ski resort and centered on a boy who supports his sister by stealing from wealthy guests.

A bored bisexual millionaire picks up a young destitute street artist and whisks her away to her villa in Saint Tropez. They meet a dashing local architect and both fall for him, setting in motion a ménage à trois of deception and betrayal.

A student is devastated when he finds that his girlfriend is cheating on him. In order to find out why she did it, he decides to spy on her and her airline pilot lover. Then he sees the pilot with a blonde woman and he begins to follow them…

A middle-aged businessman meets a band of rowdy youths and is smitten by one, named Francesca.

A spoiled teenager spends the summer at the French Riviera with her rich, widower, playboy father, but when his old flame resurfaces, she resolves to keep her frivolous lifestyle at all costs.

On this beautiful, bright first day of summer, Claire Darling has decided to get rid of all her estate. She’s laid down all her favourite objects on her front lawn for one splendid garage sale. As a horde of curious bystanders and neighbors fights over the ridiculously underpriced antiques, each object resurrects flashes of Claire Darling’s tragic and flamboyant life. Alerted by her childhood friends, Marie Darling, Claire’s estranged daughter, is forced to come back to the family mansion to stop this sale and unveil the reasons behind her mother’s eccentric decision.

Nelly leaves her lazy, unemployed husband to work for retired judge Mr Arnaud, forty years her senior, after he offers to clear her bills for her. While she types his memoirs the two develop a close friendship, but Arnaud becomes jealous when Nelly begins dating his good-looking young publisher.

Odile is a business executive looking for a new, bigger apartment. Her younger sister Camille has just completed her doctoral thesis in history and is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours because he's attracted to her. Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.

Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the seismic effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.

Tomas and Martin are a gay couple living in Paris whose marriage is thrown into crisis when Tomas impulsively begins a passionate affair with young schoolteacher Agathe. But when Martin begins an affair of his own, Tomas must confront life decisions he may be unprepared—or unwilling—to deal with.

Sabine vows to give up married lovers, and is determined to find a good husband. Her best friend Clarisse introduces her to her cousin Edmond, a busy lawyer from Paris. Sabine pursues Edmond, with the encouragement of Clarisse, but Edmond does not seem very interested.

Antoine and Laurent, old friends, spend their vacation in Corsica with their respective daughters: seventeen-year-old Louna and eighteen-year-old Marie. One evening at the beach, Louna seduces Laurent. Louna is in love, but for Laurent it was nothing more than a momentary distraction. Without revealing her lover's name, Louna confides in her father, who tries by any means to discover who his daughter's lover is. How long will the secret be able to be kept hidden?

A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy’s intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events.

Early new wave effort from Rohmer, which was the first of his six moral tales. It concerns a young man who approaches a girl in the street, but after several days without seeing her again, he becomes involved with the girl in the local bakery. Eventually, he has to choose between them when he arranges dates with them on the same day.

Ava, 13, is spending the summer on the Atlantic coast when she learns that she will lose her sight sooner than expected. Her mother decides to act as if everything were normal so as to spend their best summer ever. Ava confronts the problem in her own way. She steals a big black dog that belongs to a young man on the run...

Failed musician Jay abandoned his family and now earns a living as head bartender in a trendy London pub. Every Wednesday afternoon, a woman comes to his house for graphic, almost wordless, sex. One day, Jay follows her and learns about her. This eventually disrupts their relationship.

Paul lives with his mother in the private clinic of doctor Loisel, deeply hidden in the woods. Paul likes to roam the forest and observe nature. One day Gloria, a schizophrenic teenager of around fifteen years old, arrives, and Paul falls in love immediately.

Mourning his brother's recent death, Pierrick accepts his best friend Tessa's invitation to stay in her family home — at last, a week alone. But when her gets there, he finds the house already occupied by Tessa's sister Marie.

Pierre has been happily married for fifteen years and a good father. Still in love with his wife, he enjoys his wife and family and is content. One evening, he meets Elsa at a party and are immediately attracted to each other. Fifteen days later, they happen to meet again and the mutual attraction turns into infatuation. But his love for his wife and Elsa's rule about not dating married men prevents them from taking the next step. Instead, they fantasize about each other, and soon the fantasies mingle with the reality.

Ahmed, 18, is French of Algerian origin. He grew up in the Parisian suburbs. On the benches of the university, he meets Farah, a young Tunisian full of energy recently arrived from Tunis. While discovering a body of sensual and erotic Arabic literature that he never knew existed, Ahmed falls deeply in love with this girl, and although literally overwhelmed by desire, he will try to resist it.

An intimate study of two women friends who come to each other because of troubles with everyday life and with men and thus try to enjoy a life based on their ideas.

Pierre Belcroix and Marcel Blanc are violinists and lifelong friends living in Paris in the 1920s. While Marcel has become famous and Pierre has not, both are happy with their lives. Pierre is happily married to Romaine, a stylish young flapper. However, Marcel meets and falls in love with her, which Marcel little suspects.

What do you dream of when you're 16-years-old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can't get a bigger kick than dying. And that's why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself.

While traveling, Emmanuelle meets Kei, a man who constantly eludes her. Though she indulges in the many alluring distractions, she can’t shake their chance encounter. Will she submit to her basest desires to forge a deeper relationship?

A drunken, self-destructive woman called Betty wanders into a Parisian bar where she meets middle-aged alcoholic Laure. Laure decides to take care of Betty. Recovering in a hotel room, Betty begins to recount to Laure the story of her bourgeois life and her unhappy and unfaithful marriage.

Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.

In the second of Rohmer's moral tales, he examines the relationship between two friends and a girl who at first appears easily exploited. It is a complex tale of feelings and misconceptions, acted out within the head of the main character, as part of Rohmer's attempt to more easily simulate the mindscape quality of literature within a film.

Two couples, Pierre and Aimée, Éric and Pénélope, all share four years of friendship without cloud. Only concern, Penelope and Pierre have become lovers ... The situation becoming untenable, they decide to break. But after a final night of passionate love, fate plays a trick on them: Peter and Penelope each wake up in the body of the other! To protect their secrecy, they each find themselves having to live the life of the other. This is the beginning of the complications ...

After connecting with the shy Madeline, a jazz trumpeter embarks on a quest for a more gregarious paramour, but through a series of twists and turns punctuated by an original score, the two lovers seem destined to be together.

Paul reflects on the summer he met Angèle and Frédéric as he watches his friend being laid to rest.

15 year-old Lyz, a high school student in the French Alps, has been accepted to a highly selective ski club whose aim is to train future professional athletes. Taking a chance on his new recruit, Fred, ex-champion turned coach, decides to make Lyz his shining star regardless of her lack of experience. Under his influence, Lyz will have to endure more than the physical and emotional pressure of the training. Will Lyz’s determination help her escape his grip?

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

Ismael and Julie, in the hope of sparking their stalled relationship, enter a playful yet emotionally laced threesome with Alice. When tragedy strikes, these young Parisians are forced to deal with the fragility of life and love. For Ismael, this means negotiating through the advances of Julie's sister and a young college student – one of which may offer him redemption.

Alice and Louis are brother and sister. She is an actress; he was a teacher and poet. For more than 20 years, Alice has hated her brother. In all this time they haven’t seen one another. The death of their parents brings the siblings face to face.

Pierre and Manon are poor. They make documentaries with nothing and they live by doing odd jobs. Pierre meets a young intern, Elisabeth, and she becomes his mistress. But Pierre will not leave Manon for Elisabeth; he wants to keep both.

Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.

A celebrity journalist, juggling her busy career and personal life, has her life over-turned by a freak car accident.

Alain, a successful Parisian publisher struggling to adapt to the digital revolution, has major doubts about the new manuscript of Léonard, one of his long-time authors — another work of auto-fiction recycling his love affair with a minor celebrity. Selena, Alain’s wife, a famous stage actress, is of the opposite opinion.

In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.

A lonely Parisian woman comes to terms with her isolation and anxieties during a long summer vacation.

Fanny and Jean have everything of an ideal couple: fulfilled in their professional life, they live in a magnificent apartment in the beautiful districts of Paris and seem to be in love as on the first day. But when Fanny crosses, by chance, Alain, a former high school friend, she is immediately capsized. They see each other again very quickly and get closer and closer.

Star-crossed lovers Thérèse and Laurent think they've gotten away with murder after Thérèse's weakling husband "falls" from a speeding train. But when forced to contend with a blackmailer's demands and the mute accusations of Thérèse's mother-in-law, it's only a matter of time before the law, their passion or blind chance trips them up.

Simone inherits a dilapidated farmhouse in France and makes her way there with her husband Eric and their two children. Her dream is to turn the house into a bed and breakfast but as the hectic pace of the rebuilding gets underway, she gets caught up in the romance and chaos of it all. Losing sight of her goals, she must find her way back to the dreams and ambitions which brought her there in the first place.

Lea and her husband Marc have known Francis and his wife Karine for a very long time. Over the years, each one of them has been assigned a specific role. The balance and dynamic of the group is blown up when Lea decides to write a novel, which turns into an immediate bestseller…

Henry, a young actor, finds himself involved in a film by cinema superstar, Cédric Rovere. Charmed by his benevolence, feelings hitherto unknown are aroused, while Rovere, intrigued by Henry's dream, lives this shoot as an unexpected gift.

In this story-within-a-story, Anna is an actress starring opposite Mike in a period piece about the forbidden love between their respective characters, Sarah and Charles. Both actors are involved in serious relationships, but the passionate nature of the script leads to an off-camera love affair as well. While attempting to maintain their composure and professionalism, Anna and Mike struggle to come to terms with their infidelity.

Bobby Deerfield, a famous American race car driver on the European circuit, falls in love with the enigmatic Lillian Morelli, who is terminally ill.

An employee at the French Embassy in Bangkok invites his wife to join him – and enjoy the benefits of their open marriage.

Naïma has just turned 16. This summer, she will have to decide what she wants from life if she doesn’t want to miss out. Then her cousin Sofia arrives, with an amazing body and a dangerously seductive lifestyle. Naïma desires only to follow her own path, so long as it leads upwards… Despite the warnings of her best friend Dodo, she and Sofia will live through unforgettable encounters during a long summer that will mark them forever.



