I just finished rewatching the 1972 Eric Rohmer movie “Love In the Afternoon,” a movie that I don’t think left too strong an impression on me the first time through, not at least in comparison to Rohmer’s best work like “My Night at Maud’s” or “The Green Ray.”

Perhaps I was just in the right mood for it, but I was far more impressed with the movie this time around for the way it subverted our expectations. This was the final part of Rohmer’s six movie “Moral Tales” cycle. Rohmer, a Catholic, was very serious about morality but also made films in the style of French New Wave cinema.

So, like his contemporaries (Goddard, Truffault and many imitators,) Rohmer packed his movies with beautiful Parisian women. And for the first 15 minutes or so of the film, it seems like dozens of other French romantic (male) fantasies of the era — lots of scenes of Frederic eyeing young women and fantasizing about cheating on his wife Helene.

But then a beautiful young woman from his past — not exactly an ex-girlfriend, but a crush who was the girlfriend of a friend — looks him up to see if he has a job opening in his office. Chloe is impulsive, direct, flirtatious and more than Frederic can easily handle.

She drops by his office regularly, runs into Frederic and Helene while they are out shopping, befriends his secretaries — basically turns herself into a regular character in his life. They aren’t exactly friends, but they are never lovers either, even though they talk about the possibility continuously.

In the film’s amazing final 20 minutes, Chloe declares that she wants a child with Frederic — and wants to have the child on her own. She invites him over to her apartment (which wasn’t something new, he’d visited her a few times before) but this time takes off her clothes in front of him and lies down on the bed.

Frederic considers for a moment, then hurries out the door and runs down her very long spiraling staircase. He returns home to Helene, still in the afternoon (I just love TV shows or movies where people blow off work with no explanation) to find Helene in a pensive, apologetic mood.

Chloe had hinted at one point in the film that she had seen Helene out in Paris with another man. But Frederic dismissed the rumors of an affair. Now, as Frederic romances his wife and we hear her sad laments, it seems obvious that she has, in fact, been unfaithful. Frederic is either oblivious or willing to look past it. The movie ends with their embrace.

The inversion at the end is interesting, but it’s not what caught and held my attention this time through. Rather, I was captivated by the Frederic-Chloe relationship. It’s rare for a movie to show us a love affair without sex, but this one is more erotic and romantic because of their misconnections.

In the end. Rohmer seems to be making an interesting moral argument that there’s nothing inherently wrong with additive relationships, that it’s the second-level morality — the lying in particular — that does the real damage.

Rohmer doesn’t judge Frederic or Helene for the things they do to pass the afternoons away. He just allows his couple to end the film together, and that somehow matters more than how they arrived back home.