My Night with Maud

My Night with Maud is the third film in Rohmer's series of "Moral Tales" and it may be regarded as one of the director's finest accomplishments. It reveals all the themes which Rohmer has been preoccupied with over the years, but this time his amalgam of philosophical, delicately comic, and aesthetic details reveals to their full, potential aspects of its director which have previously been relatively unexplored.

A Catholic engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignan, superb) and his friend (Antoine Vitez) visit one of the latter's friends, Maud (Francoize Fabian), a cultivated and playful divorcee. The engineer's world view (profoundly influenced by Pascal) is shaken by Maud and he ends up falling for a young girl (Marie-Christine flarrault) who he keeps seeing in the church...

Rohmer's film focuses ingeniously on the process during which the main character's views are placed under scrutiny by the encounter with his friend, Maud, and the young student. A philosophical conversation on Pascal and mathematics between the engineer and his friend in a cafe, a dinner which the two of them have with Maud, and the first night the engineer spends at the girl's house are all rendered through Rohmer's microscopic perspective as springs of insights and knowledgeable observations. The venture appears heavy-going but Rohmer's witty treatment of the story gives My Night with Maud a lightness that makes it a delight to watch. He extracts incredibly naturalistic performances from his cast while the glittering black and white photography of Nestor Almendros renders Clermond-Ferrand a dreamlike setting for the unfolding of the story. A beautifully structured film pointing to all those unique attributes which brought Rohmer to the forefront of European cinema.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94