My Night at Maud’s
Jean-Louis Trintignant’s epic first date.
DIRECTED BY ÉRIC ROHMER
Early in My Night at Maud’s, director Éric Rohmer’s best known film, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s buttoned-up Catholic mensch Jean-Louis announces that he’s going to marry a woman he’s just seen for the first time at Christmas mass. It’s easy to get lost in the freewheeling rhythms of Rohmer’s dialogue, spoken by a quartet of hyper-articulate young philosophers, bohemian intellects, and earnest Christians and atheists alike. Yet in some ways the film is a rather straightforward test of Jean-Louis’ bold hypothesis about his future bride. The story eventually puts him in the path of an alluring second woman who finds his values gauche, which casts some doubt on the prediction.
That the answer is surprising in spite of the lurid setup is a testament to Rohmer’s rich characterization not just of Jean-Louis, but also of the titular Maud, beautifully played as both world-weary and blithe by Françoise Fabian. This is arguably the most psychologically complex of Rohmer’s moral tales about young men and women in the grips of identity crises. It’s as generous to its second-stringers, Maud’s dispirited sometime-lover (Antoine Vitez) and Jean-Louis’ gentle betrothed (Marie-Christine Barrault), as it is to its leads.
Still, at its heart the film is a powerful duet between Trintignant and Fabian. Gorgeous, impeccably dressed, and warm-hearted, they play the kinds of ideologues that can only exist in a Rohmer film—the sort who hold fast to their beliefs but still yield graciously to one another’s strange differences. You could listen to them trade barbs about chastity and the work of Blaise Pascal all night.