My Night at Maud's (Éric Rohmer, 1969) (Patreon)

First things first: I'm sure my old friend Gabe Klinger would like me to point out that, for some reason, in the U.K. the film was released as My Night With Maud.

Far and away my favorite Rohmer so far, Maud strikes me as a film in which the director is playing to his greatest strengths. His primary concerns -- morality, the division of the sexes, Catholicism as both a religion and a philosophy -- are laid right on the table. This is the sort of film that, despite its delicacy, seems to exist in order to separate the sheep and the goats. The notorious "watching paint dry" remark from Night Moves would probably be applicable here, but only to those viewers who can find no drama in articulate discussion, who maintain a high border wall between thought and action. 

The danger with philosophical talkfest films, of course, is that they can lapse into pretentiousness quite easily. Sure, some will find any film based around ideas inherently pretentious. But really, everything hinges on the intellectual sure-footedness of the filmmaker. Woody Allen at his best (Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors) was able to pull it off. A classic film in the mini-genre, Malle's My Dinner With André, is a bit of a mixed bag. And, while I'm tarrying with sacrilege, I contend that Linklater's Waking Life is one of the worst entries of the bunch. What makes these films so different?

Speech is always rhetorical. That is, whether the speaker is conscious of it or not, he or she is always directing their speech toward a listener. This is even more obvious in cinema, of course, where the viewer is at a temporal remove from the act of filming. Anyway, the rhetorically inclined filmmaker must decide not just what to talk about and how to talk about it. They must also make certain assumptions about what their audience is liable to know, understand, or care about. Many people are fascinated with theatrical process; I however am not. So for me, My Dinner With André falls a bit flat. But I recognize that this is entirely subjective. On the other hand, with Waking Life, Linklater clearly assumes his viewer to be a stoned undergraduate, besotted by the slightest shift in conventional thinking. As a film, Waking Life flails because it does not represent but rather embodies the embarrassing tendency of youth, to assume that its own discoveries are somehow new to the whole wide world.

There are aspects of My Night at Maud's that can simply be chalked up to absolute formal mastery. Néstor Almendros' crisp, limpid cinematography provides absolute environmental clarity -- Clermont emerges as a uniquely mid-level space, stuck between urban and backwater tendencies -- but (especially in Maud's apartment) also allows the brightness of ordinary settings to shine forth. Commentators have often remarked that Bazin's notions of realism, of letting the visible world impress itself upon the celluloid as is, are related to his Catholicism. I'm not certain I fully believe that, but Rohmer's film provides an object lesson for those eager to prove that point. A film about the conflict between spiritual and worldly matters, Maud's uses light and space to lend its characters a luminous atmosphere in which to grapple with the problem.

And of course, none of this would matter without the exquisite performances Rohmer elicits from his cast. We've obviously all been thinking about the late Jean-Louis Trintignant recently, how he practically made a career of subtle, restrained acting. As Jean-Louis, he is a man of ideals in the strictest sense. His devout Catholicism provides a moral system that situates both his discipline and his transgressions, serving as a theoretical wall between himself and the unpredictable universe. He goes to church, we works at Michelin, and his past as a womanizer offers him a template of experience so that he now knows exactly what he wants. (His dubious claims that he was always the heartbroken, jilted lover also serve to skirt overt responsibility.) When Jean-Louis sees Françoise (Françoise Fabian) in church, it is as though she was made to order, checking all the boxes on the personal ad in his head. He is ready to settle down, and he knows precisely who he should be settling down with.

While there is probably more to say about Jean-Louis' old university friend Vidal (Antoine Vitez) than is readily apparent, he does seem to serve primarily as a character foil for J-L, an unexpected nudge outside of his comfort zone. But one thing Vidal certainly does is provide J-L with a frame of reference for his eventual perception of Maud (Marie-Christine Barrault). A doctor, a divorcee, and Vidal's occasional fuck-buddy, she already exists as an oppositional force in J-L's mind, the kind of worldly feminist urbanite that his religion, in part, exists to shield him from. Upon actually meeting her, she represents much more than mere temptation. She threatens to penetrate his theological bubble, to realign his moral code.

Maud is charming, intelligent, self-effacing, a loving mother, and above all a liberal. Rohmer confronts his onscreen surrogate with someone who is perhaps the best possible argument that life outside the confines of Catholicism does not equal dissolution and chaos. Maud is purposeful, restrained, but also in full command of her sexuality and open about her desires. She's more than the woman J-L's mother warned him about. She is an avatar for a different set of priorities, and an emblem of their legitimacy.

The fact that J-L leaves Maud behind and engineers a rather brazen meet-cute with Françoise is beautifully bittersweet, and the film's coda drives this point home. On the one hand, Rohmer respects J-L's beliefs and identity. His night at Maud's was not enough to derail him. If it had been, this would have made a mockery of his moral code, which is something dozens of rom-coms have been more than happy to do. At the same time, meeting Maud again by chance after five years, they both feel a tinge, not of regret so much as curiosity about a path not taken. But both are reasonably happy, or at least content. Nevertheless, Rohmer goes one step further, delivering a final sting in the tail. When J-L learns about Françoise's earlier affair, he realizes that staying the course could not protect him from human fallibility. Rohmer is careful not to shame Françoise, like a lesser filmmaker might have. Instead, the revelation clarifies that she has chosen J-L as deliberately as he'd chosen her, as a path to a secure future, safe but ultimately redeemed.