In trying to build the struggle [between Chloe and Frédéric in Chloe in the Afternoon] to a crisis, Rohmer slips into the one big pitfall of Cartesianism—instead of mapping reality onto a set of mental constructs, he imposes constructs arbitrarily on reality. When Chloe tells Frédéric outright that she loves him and intends to have a baby by him, he surely has to react some way: break with her, make it with her and to hell with fantasy, or at least get worried; but Rohmer, preoccupied with the pattern of his approach to the crisis, lets Frédéric go smiling along the same as ever.

At this point, too, the contrivance in Chloe's character begins to show. Earlier, when Frédéric says lightly that in another, imagined world he'd marry her, Chloe declares that she never has such daydreams. The contrast emerges briefly and believably. But in the last third of the film Chloe's character—disillusioned, blunt, depressive—seems too deliberately conceived as a challenge to Frédéric's. It's not clear why she persists with him—whether she really loves him or is simply playing a game. There are no independent clues to her deeper character, and in the end she is reduced from an intriguing mystery to a function of the plot.

Yet these signs of abstract contrivance are far outweighed by Rohmer's sensitivity to the richness of reality…. And the whole film develops into a rebuttal of Frédéric's assumption that his ordered view of life and of his relations with other people has any existence outside his mind.

Rohmer begins the rebuttal gently, almost imperceptibly. (p. 58)

[Although the scene when Frédéric decides to leave Chloe] misfires, it is certainly neither sentimental nor conventional. The sweater itself has no symbolic meaning: its removal is a nexus of tactile and kinesthetic sensations which suddenly connect Frédéric with reality. It is brought home to him physically that he can no longer rationalize his attraction to Chloe as an extension of his love for Hélène. At long last (if only temporarily) Frédéric breaks out of the imaginary world in his mind.

This is not an easy ending to accept, since it involves a denial of adventure and an apparent retreat into the security of the familiar. It's tempting to complain that Frédéric is merely playing it safe—and to extend this charge to Rohmer himself…. Yet Rohmer quietly works and reworks an extremely narrow territory of human behavior. (p. 59)

[With Chloe Rohmer takes a big] risk. In each of his previous Moral Tales, the woman who disturbs the protagonist's equanimity appears obviously attractive from the start. But the irruption of Chloe is so unexpected that it threatens the whole fabric of the film. If this had been Rohmer's first Moral Tale, I might assume he simply miscalculated. Since it is his last, I think he aimed at a bigger and more active clash between idea and reality than ever before—but within a concentrated framework that would still draw the viewer into his protagonist's experience….

[Rohmer] occupies a small territory, but he fills it with the antinomies of coolness and intensity, calculation and surprise. (p. 60)