Love in the Afternoon

Heavy-handed didacticism is the great danger that all religious artists must fear, because it compromises art and renders faith no great service. Our beloved Flannery O’Connor avoided this danger admirably. In most of her stories, ‘Christianity’ is either absent or repulsive, yet her work is truly Christian. That is to say, her characters live in a universe where Christianity is true , whether they know it or not. Sin and death are everywhere, but grace is real and operative in the details of life.

Having just seen the 1972 French New Wave classic, Love in the Afternoon , I believe that director Eric Rohmer (a conservative Roman Catholic) has O’Connor’s talent for painting the world with unobtrusive Christian realism. The male lead appears to be a secular bourgeois but, in what Christians would call a moment of grace, he is saved from the seduction of adulterous escapism and is brought sharply back to the bedrock moral reality of his marriage.

But I violate my own formalist principles in recommending it for your moral edification. It is a visually beautiful, occasionally funny film crafted by a total master of cinematic art. There is a fair amount of brief and partial nudity, but it is never pornographic. Watch it.