Ma nuit chez maud (My Night at Maud's)

Rohmer’s first masterpiece is one of the most fascinating dialogue-driven films ever made. The ‘plot’ – if you can call it that – consists mainly of conversations between Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Maud (Françoise Fabian). He is thirty-four, single, an engineer at the local Michelin factory, a practising Catholic with a strictly defined view of the world and of male-female relationships. She is an elegant, divorced, dark-haired woman who seduces him in an extremely cunning manner. Jean-Louis is unable to choose between this free-spirited, liberal-minded intellectual woman, who even imbues discussions about Pascal with an erotic tension, and the 22-year-old angelic blonde, Christine (Marie-Christine Barrault), who caught his eye during midnight mass. So much so that he decided on the spur of the moment that she would be his future wife, even though they had barely exchanged a few words. Their exchanges, and above all the subtle differences between their rhetoric and their body language, capture the essence of Rohmer’s cinematic art: erotic desires are transformed into spiritual questions, and scenes in which two people do nothing more than talk to one another take on a purely cinematic form. One of the paradoxes is that this talking film exudes a spellbinding quality that is difficult to put into words.

Around the moral inflexibility of his protagonist, Rohmer weaves a film of equally tight composition, in which the distinctly literary emotional quality is perfectly supported by an admirable classical mise-en-scène. The three key scenes are long conversations: they are paradoxical masterpieces of pure cinema. Late into the night, Jean-Louis, Maud and Vidal (Antoine Vitez) – the communist school friend who dragged him along to Maud’s bare flat – sit discussing Pascal and Jansenism, chance and free will, faith and predestination. Pascal in particular is put under the microscope: they consult his Les pensées to verify quotations, and Rohmer even treats us to a close-up of a page from the book. French cinema from this period is indeed one in which people happily read books, philosophise about everything and anything, and smoke incessantly. When the philosophy professor kicks the bucket, Jean-Louis and Maud continue the conversations just the two of them, but a playful sensuality also creeps into their exchanges, which also has to do with the position they have now adopted: Maud transforms her sofa into a bed, crawls under the sheets, whilst Jean-Louis sits and lies on top of the sheets beside her. Their exchanges, and above all the subtle differences between their rhetoric and their body language, capture the essence of Rohmer’s cinematic art: erotic desires are transformed into spiritual questions, and scenes in which two people do nothing more than talk to one another take on a purely cinematic form. One of the paradoxes is that this ‘talking film’ exudes a spellbinding quality that is difficult to put into words.

Compared to his later comedies of manners, this is a very serious film, though that does not prevent certain situations and dialogues from being funny. Such as when Maud snaps at the two men who have just come from midnight mass: “You both stink of holy water.” But the greatest paradox of Ma nuit chez Maud remains that a film in which there is endless chatter is, nonetheless, intensely cinematic. Rohmer’s mise-en-scène never demands attention, yet is masterful in its deceptive simplicity and quiet power. The film’s structure is also more complex than it appears at first glance. For instance, Christine ultimately turns out to be linked to Maud as well, which somewhat undermines the self-assurance and moral superiority of the puritanical Jean-Louis.

Louis Trintignant and Françoise Fabian deliver exceptionally intelligent performances and were instrumental in the success of this film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1969 and remains the essential title for anyone wishing to discover Rohmer’s world and work.

- Patrick Duynslaegher