Here’s another one of those talky foreign films that examines philosophical questions and the dynamics of male-female relationships. The director, Eric Rohmer, comes at these issues from a distinctly Catholic perspective.

Historical Background: Eric Rohmer was one of the critics of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema who turned to filmmaking to initiate the French New Wave. Rohmer was a staunch Catholic and far more conservative than his fellow New Wave auteurs. Rohmer’s films are typically weak in suspense, action, and plot, dealing, instead, with educated young adults from the middle class engaging in endless conversation and romantic posturing. Rohmer’s films are mostly apolitical but are packed with literary and philosophical references. Viewers can expect witty, intelligent conversation, but little else. He is interested in communication issues such as mixed messages and masked feelings. Rohmer avoids both plot clichés and dramatic signifiers such as close-ups, dramatic music, or unusual camera angles designed to tell us how to feel about the characters. Since his characters also seldom say precisely what they mean, Rohmer gives viewers plenty to think about as they react to the film. To that extent, he treats his audience like mature adults. On the other hand, Rohmer films all have the ultimate purpose of promoting his conservative Catholic agenda. To that extent, he treats his audience like so many targets for propaganda.

Rohmer’s oeuvre overall is rather highly structured. Most Rohmer films belong to series of four or six films sharing common thematic territory. My Night with Maud (1969) was part of the series called “Six Moral Tales.” Two other worthy films from that same group were Claire's Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Although Rohmer’s films are usually classified as comedies, they seldom induce anything more than amusement or a sense of whimsy.

The Story: Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a thirty-year old handsome bachelor is a devout Catholic who attends mass on a regular basis. Having been through a number of love affairs as a young man, he is ready to settle down into a life of marriage and fidelity. He thinks that he’s spotted the perfect prospect for a marriage partner in the form of a wholesomely attractive blond, Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), whom he sees at mass on Christmas Eve. He tries to follow her to find out who she is, but she’s riding a moped and he’s driving a car and in the narrow, busy streets of this French village, the advantage goes to the moped. He loses sight of her.

Jean-Louis stops at a coffee shop and runs into an old childhood friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), now a philosophy professor, who he hasn’t see for fourteen years. They sit down together to renew their old friendship and get into a conversation about religion, philosophy, and mathematics. Vidal suggests that Jean-Louis join him for Christmas dinner at the apartment of his one-time lover, Maud (Françoise Fabian), whom he claims is both intelligent and attractive.

At Maud’s place, a lot more witty and intelligent conversation ensues. Maud is a recent divorcee with a young daughter. Maud is nonreligious and worldly. The beautiful and intellectually nimble Maud is quite obviously used to having her way with men. It soon becomes evident that she has set her sights on Jean-Louis. Though she criticizes him as something of a “boy-scout” for his Catholic rigidity, she is turned on by his openness, self-assuredness, and ability to parry her attacks. When snow begins to fall outside, Vidal insists on hurrying home. Maud talks Jean-Louis into staying the night in the “spare room” rather than risk driving home on the icy roads.

It turns out that there is no spare room and that Maud has something else in mind. They talk into the wee hours, Jean-Louis discussing mainly his newfound commitment to Catholic virtues and Maud opening up about her life’s story. She is a pediatrician, had been married to another doctor (the father of her daughter), still very much admires her ex-husband, but they got on each other’s nerves. They divorced amicably. Both had been having affairs while married. Maud’s affair had ended tragically when her lover, who she believed to be her true soul mate, had died in a car crash on icy roads (partly explaining Maud’s insistence that Jean-Louis not drive home in the fresh snow). Maud’s husband had an affair with a young Catholic girl who Maud had very much disliked. Despite Maud’s obvious willingness to proceed from conversation to sex, Jean-Louis resists. He starts out sleeping on the chair, later moving into her bed but on top of the covers. As the night turns cold, he ends up under the covers with her and she sleeps in the buff. They begin to embrace while half-asleep, but this time Maud is the one to recoil, stating that she prefers a man who knows his own mind. In the end, their night together remains a chaste one. They agree to get together the next day, along with Vidal and another girl, for a bit of mountain climbing.

While heading home, Jean-Louis spots Françoise – the blond from mass. This time he is able to catch up with her and asks her point blank how they can get to know one another. She more or less agrees to lunch after mass on Sunday. Jean-Louis spends the afternoon climbing with Maud, they smooch a couple of times (“as friends”), and enjoy more sparkling repartee. Maud will be moving in a month to begin a new practice in another city.

On Sunday, Jean-Louis meets up with Françoise after mass and drives her home. Once again, snow intervenes conveniently as Jean-Louis’s car gets stuck near Françoise’s room. She invites him to stay the night in an adjacent room but her intention is truly that he sleep in the other room. Their conversation is far shallower and circumspect that what we had seen among Jean-Louis, Vidal, and Maud at Maud’s place.

The relationship between Jean-Louis and Françoise continues to progress slowly. Her only reservation is that she is afraid that she is not the person he believes her to be. She has had her flings and has clearly not saved her virginity for marriage. He tells her that he, too, has had previous affairs but suggests that they agree that there is no need on either side to discuss those past romances.

SPOILER AHEAD. SKIP TO THEMES SECTION TO AVOID!

The story now fast-forwards five years. Jean-Louis and Françoise are married and have a young child. On their way to a beach, they cross paths with Maud. Jean-Louis stops to chat with Maud, noting also that Maud and Françoise have apparently previously encountered one another. In fact, Maud comments that she should have guessed that Jean-Louis’s mysterious blond had been Françoise . Françoise goes on ahead with the child, leaving Maud and Jean-Louis to catch up briefly on what has transpired for each in the intervening years. Maud has remarried but is apparently on the verge of another divorce. She bemoans her “bad luck” with men. They part and Jean-Louis rejoins his young family. Françoise is obviously on edge. In a bit of voice-over narration, we are made privy to Jean-Louis’s internal realization that she is not upset about his relationship with Maud but with her own. He realizes that she must have been the young Catholic girl with whom Maud’s husband had his affair. He decides that it will be best to let sleeping dogs lie. He says something upbeat and reassuring and he and Françoise go off to play happily together with their son.

Themes: My Night at Maud’s is certainly rich in themes. That, after all, is what Rohmer films are all about. One philosophical issue raised by the film is the old freewill versus fate/God’s plan/chance debate. The issue first arises when Jean-Louis and Vidal meet each other by chance in the coffee shop. Neither of the two men frequent the coffee shop, so it strikes them that the probability against them meeting there is enormous. Rohmer is polishing up the old “proof” of God’s design based on the occurrence of seemingly unexplainable coincidences. The argument is fallacious, however, because Vidal and Jean-Louis have each gone to hundreds of thousands of places over the last fourteen years. The odds may be a hundred thousand to one against them happening to meet in any one of those places in particular, but the odds of meeting in at least one of the hundreds of thousands of places that they’ve been to are much higher. In a game of Russian roulette with a gun having one-thousand chambers and only one bullet, it always seems like an amazing coincidence when one person finally gets the bullet even though it is inevitable that someone will if the game proceeds long enough. Rohmer then furthers the argument by revealing that Maud believes in her personal control over her destiny while Jean-Louis has abandoned “chasing after women” in favor of chance encounters. As a good Catholic, he’s going to leave it to God to direct him to the right woman. When he succeeds and Maud fails to find the right partner, Rohmer is arguing that we are better off putting ourselves in God’s hands than trying to control our own destinies. Maud states, near the end, that she has “bad luck” with men, by which tactic Rohmer slices poor Maud up in two ways. First, it undercuts her claim to believe in freewill, since she is now viewing herself as the helpless victim of luck. Secondly, it suggests that she is being punished by divine intervention for her lack of faith in God’s plan and lack of religious conviction. Rohmer wants us to share his conclusion that the way to happiness and a “good marriage” is by following Catholic doctrine.

The entire freewill versus fate dichotomy is fallacious. The human brain controls the activities of the individual person and a portion of those activities, directed by the prefrontal cortex, are conscious, voluntary, and value-directed. The core identity of a person is that person’s beliefs and values and the behaviors that derive from these crucial components of “self.” To that extent, a person certainly has freewill. Each person, however, is a transient collaboration of molecules that also belong to the larger universe. Each of those atoms existed elsewhere before that person’s self began to form at conception, and will again exist elsewhere in the universe after that person’s death. The conscious, voluntary, value-directed influences of the prefrontal cortex are not separate from the mechanics of the larger universe but simply a subset of those mechanics. Asking whether we are governed by freewill or by fate is like asking whether the principles of neurophysiology are valid or the principles of physics. Both are valid. Each successive level of organization in the universe, from subatomic particles to human social systems, superimposes additional principles of organization that govern interactions at that level.

A second theme raised by Rohmer is the issue of relationships between men and women: commitment and fidelity versus self-centeredness and transient affairs. It was interesting for me that I watched this film immediately after watching and reviewing Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), because Bergman’s perspective is diametrically opposed to that of Rohmer. Bergman believes that marriage is a societal trap that suffocates individuality. Rohmer believes in the sanctity of marriage and the importance of subordinating individuality to family stability. I disagree with both Bergman and Rohmer’s perspectives on marriage. Maud and Françoise are presented to us by Rohmer as two alternative kinds of women and, by extension, two types of potential marriages. Neither alternative would be satisfactory to me. I would require some of what each of these women have to offer. Maud is the far more interesting of the two women. She is passionate, intelligent, experienced, productive, and wise in some regards. She is open and honest and wants to engage a man in genuine conversation from the soul. Like every Rohmer character, she disguises some of her motivations, from herself as well as others, but otherwise she is a very appealing woman. On the other hand, she would scare me to death in one respect. She and her husband divorced for no better reason than “getting on each other’s nerves.” I wouldn’t dare fall in love with Maud because I’m not so arrogant as to believe that I could live with such a woman for more than a few years without getting on her nerves. Then, I’d likely get dumped hard despite still being crazy with love for her. Like Jean-Louis, I believe that marriage has to be based on a high level of commitment (though I don’t believe that commitment can be absolute, such as when relationships become abusive). Maud’s failure to find “the right man” was not due to bad luck. It was a predictable consequence of her placing too little importance on the need for a degree of self-sacrifice and commitment to make a relationship work long term. Relationships can’t survive if the participants are there only so long as they find the relationship entertaining and pleasurable. That may be fine for casual friendships, but it’s not going to provide the stability that marriages ought to have for purposes of raising children.

On the other hand, the relationship that ultimately emerges between Jean-Louis and Françoise is also not my ideal. He chose her out of a crowd based exclusively on her appearance and being a Catholic, knowing nothing about her personality, ideas, beliefs, tastes, or habits. To me, she has a blandness of personality and shallowness of intelligence. She is twelve years younger than Jean-Louis, which smacks a bit of that chauvinistic desire of men to have the upper hand as well as a young, sexy wife. Rohmer seems to suggest that part of what is necessary to keep a marriage intact is to NOT talk openly about issues, to NOT know too much about one another’s feelings and thoughts. Jean-Louis and Françoise opt not to discuss affairs prior to their marriage or Françoise’s relationship with Maud’s husband. I don’t believe that marriage needs to be based on systematic shallowness and withholding information. There might be times when it is best to bury an intractable issue or an opinion if its threatening a marriage, but to routinely sweep issues under the rug is a very poor basis for marriage. I think its possible to combine Maud’s belief in genuine intimacy with the belief in commitment of Jean-Louis and Françoise.

An interesting variant on the commitment issue is whether commitment should exist before one even meets one’s soul mate or spouse. Certainly, Catholicism and most other religions argue that men and women should “save themselves” for marriage, which is a kind of implicit commitment to one’s yet-to-be-identified future spouse. Most Americans don’t subscribe to that viewpoint these days. Jean-Louis was not yet involved with Françoise, other than having spotted her in church and wanting to meet and marry her, when he spent the night at Maud’s. Most men would have rationalized that there was no reason not to have a fling with Maud before moving on to whatever relationship is waiting in the wings with Françoise. Though Jean-Louis had “cheated” on his future wife in the past, through several affairs, he had now adopted the more Catholic viewpoint. I don’t personally subscribe to the “commitment in advance” idea. When two virgins marry, they often have a very poor sex life together. It’s the blind leading the blind problem. Like everything else in life, one learns to be a good sex partner partly through experience, though there’s also an element of natural talent. I think that men and women who have had some judicious experience with intimacy, both sexual and emotional, make better life partners.

A third theme broached by Rohmer in this film is Pascal’s Wager – a famous philosophical defense of faith, but another fallacious one. Pascal argued that you may either bet on the existence of God or bet against it. Even if the odds are only one in a hundred that God exists, you are better off betting on His existence than against it, according to Pascal, because the reward will be infinite (eternity in heaven). By contrast, if you bet on the existence of God and He turns out not to exist, you haven’t lost anything. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that you have sacrificed something if you base your search for truth on opportunity for personal gain. It’s not a valid epistemology. The truth of an issue is not truly related in any way with how that issue impacts one’s self-interests. Most people are ignorant precisely because they never understand that truth cannot be discovered by pursuit of self-interest. They are unrelated issues. The belief systems of most people are structured to provide for their needs rather than the discovery of truth. For me personally, it would be impossible to adopt a belief merely because that belief served my needs or interests. I could pretend to subscribe to such a belief, but deep down I would know that I was spouting that belief merely out of self-interest, which has no relationship to truth. The second problem is that Pascal’s argument presupposes that if there is a God and a heaven, you will be excluded from heaven if you do not have faith. I personally can’t imagine an almighty being whose top criterion for admitting the souls he’s created into paradise is subscribing to a particular system of thought. If God exists, he gave me the power of reason, and my reason tells me that truth has nothing to do with self-interest. It tells me that critical thinking, not faith, is the best way to conduct the search for truth. The argument based on Pascal’s wager not only depends on whether God does or does not exist, but also on the validity of the claims of Catholicism and other religions that heaven exists and that the only way to heaven is by subscribing to the one true religion – whichever one that might happen to be. If getting to heaven hinges on finding the right “truth,” most of us are in deep poop, since no one religion claims anything close to a majority of people as adherents.

A fourth theme in My Night at Maud’s is the issue of mixed messages and hidden agendas. This is favorite territory for Rohmer. The entire conversation at Maud’s between Jean-Louis, Maud, and Vidal seems to be unusual in its degree of depth, openness, and intimacy, yet it’s all a kind of faux-intellectualism. They cleverly joust with one another, dissect each other’s ideas and values, but seldom get right down to expressing their feelings or baring their souls. Instead of taking the risk of honesty, these folks cloak their real feelings in witty repartee. Vidal disguises his motivation for pushing Jean-Louis and Maud together. He claims not to love Maud but Maud says otherwise. Maud coyly tries to disguise her effort to seduce Jean-Louis. She’d rather play at relationships than lay herself open to real commitment. Jean-Louis strings her along either cruelly or out of his own ambivalence. Rohmer has presented us with a realistic view of how such romantic dances play out in life, at least among college students and intellectuals. It’s all very exhilarating even if ultimately phony. Jean-Louis’s later relationship with Françoise is both more honest and more dishonest. Commitment is a true baring of one’s soul but, emotionally and intellectually, this Catholic couple are closed off from one another.

Production Values: The pacing of this film is very deliberate. Some viewers will be turned off by that element alone. There is very little action. Most of the film consists of long, pseudo-philosophical conversations. There’s lots of attention to the ordinary business of living, such as preparing tea, cooking, crossing streets, attending church, and so forth. This adds effectively to the sense of realism. I enjoy talky films, myself, but the philosophical aspects of the conversation struck me as very superficial and dominated by fallacious reasoning. Rohmer enjoys making stories about people with problems and he succeeds here in giving us two very interesting characters in Jean-Louis and Maud.

Longtime Rohmer associate Nestor Almendros provided the cinematography. There is much to admire. The sensitivity to lighting and composition is exquisite. There is a lot of emphasis on medium shots and long, unbroken takes. The use of medium distance shots places emphasis on the dialog and the relationships rather than inviting viewers to identify with one particular character.

The performances are amazingly natural. These seem like real people having real conversations. The frequent use of long takes put a lot of demand on the actors but also gives them the opportunity to really get into their parts. I’ve never seen Jean-Louis Trintignant looking handsomer than he does here. He provides an unseemly blend of innocence and sophistication. He really does come across as being the “boy-scout” that Maud accuses him of being. His other work includes And God Created Women (1956), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), A Man and a Woman (1966), Bad Girls (1968), Z (1969), The Conformist (1970), La Nuit de Varennes (1982), and Red (1994) (see Three Colors). Françoise Fabian’s other best role was in Belle de Jour (1967). She is utterly fabulous here as Maud. Marie-Christine Barrault was okay as Françoise, but nothing special. She later appeared in Cousin, Cousine (1975) and Stardust Memories (1980). She is the niece of Jean-Louis Barrault.

Bottom-Line: My Night at Maud’s is considered one of Rohmer’s best films and a quintessential example of what they do and do not have to offer. After watching A Good Marriage, which I didn’t much care for, I promised myself I’d give Rohmer another chance. Although I respect the present film for its clever dialog and film style, I won’t be going back to Rohmer anytime soon. Thematically, his films are too blatantly Catholic propaganda for my tastes. His arguments in defense of conservative and religious values are, frankly, shallow and manipulative. I’m giving this film four-stars for its craftsmanship, but would not recommend it to a friend because of its disingenuous thematic content. My Night at Maud’s is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 110 minutes.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older