My Night at Maud's

Starring:Jean-Louis Trintignant, FranÃ§oise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault, Antoine Vitez, LÃ©onide Kogan, Guy LÃ©ger, Anne Dubot, Marie Becker, Marie-Claude Rauzier
Director: Eric Rohmer
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

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French director Eric Rohmer, former critic and Cahiers du Cinema editor, created a very special romantic film series around the difficult choices men make when they fall in love with two women called "Six Moral Tales." My Night at Maud's was the third entry, and it was so well received in 1969 that it gave Rohmer international prominence. To this day, it remains Rohmer's masterpiece, a brilliantly insightful and sublime meditation on adult indiscretions. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a chaste engineer who thinks he's met his soul mate in church (Marie-Christine Barrault), yet winds up accidentally spending the night with the seductive Maud (Francoise Fabian), who is more his intellectual equal. Filmed in stark black and white by Nestor Almendros, this is one of those rare films in which questions about philosophy translate into unexpected answers about the heart. It's slow and methodical, but well worth the experience. --Bill Desowitz

Customer Reviews:

The head vs. the heart.......2005-10-26

Eric Rohmer's intelligent look at the subject of principles vs. intuition. A mathemetician (Jean-Louis) meets an old school chum (Vidal), a philosopher, and they begin a conversation about Pascal and mind over heart and faithfulness. The conversation continues at Vidal's girlfriend's (Maud) house.

Suddenly our mathemetician is left alone with the Maud, and she invites him to spend the night with her. He accepts but is determined not to sleep with her to maintain his priciples, and in a very funny scene he's successful. After a while he marries Francoise; 5 years later he meets Maud again and learns, by accident, that Francoise was once Maud's husband's lover.

Typical for a Rohmer film, not much happens, but there's lots of talk of a very high quality. But it's not JUST talk - Rohmer is skilled enough not to forget he's making a movie here. He is very on target as his characters explore the topics at hand. It's a very satisfying movie, well worth a watch.

Fourth opus: the supreme expression of good taste!.......2005-08-03

Eric Rohmer' s artistic personality has been one of the most original and eloquent. Expressive sobriety supported by a high caliber humor sense. In this lovable and intelligent work, the seduction issue has never been treated, as an admirable exercise of seduction that links with the purest tradition of the French theater of old ages, plenty of irony, sarcasm and fine charm.
Indeed, the picture is extremely talky, and slow paved in consequence; Rohmer supports on an elegant and smart script plenty of fine intelligence; it's the art of the seduction in its highest order.

An unforgettable ending.......2005-03-26

I must have watched this film at least twenty times--it never gets boring. A lot of talking in this film--if you don't know French, have fun reading the relentless subtitles. Interesting dialog about Pascal--the idea of fate, luck, wager. It serves as the film's allegory--gambling on a relationship with a person who is both sensual and pious. Can there be happiness in such a combination? One has to only take a chance. And even though you may think you found that special someone with both attributes, there's always a catch. And the catch in "...Maud's" is revealed at the end of the film--which is absolutely beautiful. The DVD is not as bad as some of the reviews here claim it to be--it's black and white, so with the exception of a couple of scenes with weak contrasts, I think it's an above average transfer. Heck, it's shot by Cuba's very own Oscar winner Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven).

This film is so tight!.......2003-11-27

Sublime. To me, this stealthily thrilling film exploits both the living quality of a theatrical performance and the privileged intimacy that cinema offers -- close-ups, mobile perspectives, and so on. Rohmer's tale seems put together to resemble a peculiarly intrusive documentary, an impossibly close piece of observational cinema. Half the joy of experiencing his fiction stems from the convincing impression that one is (secretly) watching a group of interesting adults socializing spontaneously in the manner of their culture and class. The other half of one's pleasure lies in the awareness, as the film concludes, that an intricate and subtle structure has been unfolding and cleverly weaving the tale's elements together all along. Rohmer's film works on several levels, and is well worth viewing by the socially curious and the open-minded.

Don't bother.......2003-10-17

Lame-o, Shmame-o. Horribly dated and boring beyond belief!

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