“The thought of the future needn’t depress us, since we have none.”

Éric Rohmer’s third of his six moral tales, My Night At Maud’s, concerns a Catholic man, Jean-Louis, who lives life practising a philosophy based on rationalisation and mathematical probability. At church, he falls in love with a beautiful young girl and vows she will be his wife. She is his ideal partner: blonde, pure, and devout. But after a brief encounter with an old schoolmate, Jean-Louis finds himself precariously spending a night with the enigmatic and provocative Maud, a free-spirited divorcée whose bewildering charm and complexity threaten to dismantle his rigid moral principles and standards.

Rohmer is known for his modern and liberal approach to social and gender…

Vertigo is the basis, which Eric Rohmer once analyzed in a prophecy of his own aesthetic: "We travel in space the way we travel in time, as our thoughts and the characters’ thoughts also travel." The preamble traces Jean-Louis Trintignant’s drive from the Ceyrat countryside to frosty Clermont-Ferrand, a long-shot of the urban landscape finds church towers rising out of early-morning mist. The Elusive Woman (Marie-Christine Barrault) is a pious blonde kneeling at Mass; she’s a practicing Catholic like him, he follows her, loses her, decides she will be his wife. He bumps into a Marxist chum (Antoine Videz), they talk Pascal -- Videz appreciates the logic of the Wager (you lose nothing but can gain plenty with faith, the…

Mohamed Radwan's #6 Film Selection for Edgar

Eric Rohmer's 3rd Moral Tale

-->Possible moral topic(s) treated: The substitution of principles dictated by moral codes with irrational impulses that contradict them.

Note: Although this gem was planned as the third moral tale, it was released after the fourth moral tale La Collectionneuse (1967) due to delay in production.

In short, My Night at Maud's is a tremendous cinema masterpiece in all imaginable aspects.

Jesus, how do I begin punching this damn keyboard?

Ok, first. Rohmer's elements! Yeah, his elements.

Ummm...

A) Rohmer was known at this point for utilizing a literary narrative, in which a protagonistic voiceover narration would reveal what wasn't told or shown explicitly to the viewer. In the…

*SOME SPOILERS*

I’ve become a huge Eric Rohmer fan over the past few years. The older I get, and the more complex my idea of life becomes, the more I appreciate his work: full of eroticism, irony and paradox, where the sun only comes out to cast darker shadows. There’s no denying, though, that many of his films follow a certain formula: not just in their plots (his six Moral Tales, made between 1962 and ’72, are all based on F. W. Murnau’s expressionist silent romance, Sunrise), but also in the form and structure he favours. My Night at Maud’s isn’t his best movie, but it’s perhaps his most Rohmerish, almost to the point of exaggeration: it begins slowly, turns…

Almost too immense to put into words, despite the gorgeous simplicity of the story. It's a small, insular narrative that nonetheless feels immense and overwhelming - a masterpiece, in other words. Will reserve more detailed comment for a third viewing, except to note that emphasis on Rohmer's dialogue gives short shrift to the keenness (and importance) of his visuals: e.g. the shot of the two couples ascending a snowy hillside; the slow zoom towards Jean-Louis and Françoise confessing to each other; the ironic distance of that closing image of familial bliss (an echo of Varda's Le bonheur). And then, of course, there's that lovely single-take of Maud recounting her love affair and baring her soul, which is as wonderful an…

It wasn’t that long ago that I watched this for the first time, but it really left a bigger impression than I had realized. Rohmer’s deductive approach to morality is great in the first few films of the series, but in this one, with Pascal’s mathematics of hope serving as the metric for the characters’ lifestyles/philosophies, it feels even more essential to the film’s form and the characters’ arcs (or lack thereof). There’s only one line of narration near the beginning and a few sentences at the end, but that’s all that’s needed, and despite how talky it is (I wish I were as articulate and in touch with my own ideals as these characters are), the unspoken tension is…

“The thought of the future needn’t depress us, since we have none.”

Éric Rohmer’s third of his six moral tales, My Night At Maud’s, concerns a Catholic man, Jean-Louis, who lives life practising a philosophy based on rationalisation and mathematical probability. At church, he falls in love with a beautiful young girl and vows she will be his wife. She is his ideal partner: blonde, pure, and devout. But after a brief encounter with an old schoolmate, Jean-Louis finds himself precariously spending a night with the enigmatic and provocative Maud, a free-spirited divorcée whose bewildering charm and complexity threaten to dismantle his rigid moral principles and standards.

Rohmer is known for his modern and liberal approach to social and gender…