My Night with Maud
Ma nuit chez Maud
Eric Rohmer (1969)
My progress in catching up with Rohmer’s six ‘contes moraux’ is slow. I saw L’amour l’après-midi (chronologically the last of the six) in 1973; this, the third in the series, was only my second, 37 years on. La boulangère de Monceau, La carrière de Suzanne, La collectionneuse and Le genou de Claire still to go … There was an additional slowcoach resonance to watching Ma nuit chez Maud. It’s set in Clermont-Ferrand. If I’d accepted sooner in my second year at university that I was going to have to do a term abroad in France and had got going with an application, Clermont-Ferrand is where I’d have ended up, rather than Poitiers.
Pauline Kael, although she admired Le genou de Claire, was fed up of Rohmer’s lapidary style by the time of L’amour l’après-midi. On the evidence of Ma nuit chez Maud, he’s certainly a miniaturist and the faultnessness of the film-making can make you want to find fault with it. But it’s a very enjoyable picture. Middle-class people in French cinema tend to philosophise at the drop of a hat – their apothegms often come out of nowhere, sprinkled on the dialogue like intellectually pretentious garnish. In Ma nuit chez Maud, the principals talk in this way more or less continuously but the effect is bracing because their philosophies of life are integral to the story, because the lines Rohmer gives his actors are clever, and because the actors are good enough not only to deliver the lines wittily but to express personalities behind the words, animating the disjunction between the characters’ intellectual positions and their sensual impulsions. This is especially true of the great Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose ability here to move from cold, even brutal hostility to palpable vulnerability – without our being able to see how he makes the transition – is film acting magic. So is the way he makes a pot of tea.
The man Trintignant plays is also called Jean-Louis (though I’m not sure he’s ever referred to by name), an engineer at Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand. The centre of Ma nuit chez Maud is a three-way discussion involving the Catholic Jean-Louis, his Marxist friend Vidal, who actually earns his living as a philosopher (he’s an academic at the local university), and the freethinking Maud – in her apartment, where Jean-Louis will stay the night, sleeping on the same bed as his hostess but without their having sex. As Maud, the beautiful Françoise Fabian is a fine sparring partner for Trintignant; we can see the hurt Jean-Louis is causing Maud even as she maintains her verbal poise – we’re not sure if he’s not even seeing it or is ignoring it. Jean-Louis is determined to marry a blonde Catholic girl, and Françoise, whom he first sees in church, is the elect one. In her film debut, Marie-Christine Barrault as Françoise is very striking but irritating too: her transitions from smiley radiance to sullenness can seem rather deliberate, especially compared with what Trintignant is doing. Vidal is played by Antoine Vitez. The movement of the film – shot by Nestor Almendros and edited by Cécile Decugis – is wonderfully smooth but still achieves emotional variety. There is no music (as usual in Rohmer); with such a superabundance of words, it would be surplus to requirements.
27 July 2010