Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, a personal favorite, is a singularly lovely and infinitely rich film. Made in 1969, the third of his Six Moral Tales, despite the title Rohmer gave to the series of films beginning with 1963's The Bakery Girl of Monceau and ending with 1972's Love in the Afternoon, is not a moral tale in the sense of having a specific lesson to teach. The film, instead, takes the time to carefully observe the actions of its characters, particularly the protagonist (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a thirty-four-year-old engineer who recently took a job at the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand. In the first few scenes, we see him--the character's name is never mentioned, so we'll just call him Jean-Louis--attend mass (he is a practicing Catholic), where he catches a glimpse of a beautiful, blonde girl (Marie-Christine Barrault), and at that moment decides that she's the one he's going to marry.
Elsewhere, he works on mathematical problems, chats with his colleagues about their plans for the winter (Christmas is near as the film opens), and picks up Pascal's Pensées at a bookstore. The next night or so, he runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), as he enters a restaurant. They haven't seen each other in fourteen years, and the conversation teasingly ranges from the probability that the two of them would meet in Clermont-Ferrand (Jean-Louis explains that it is impossible to calculate since neither of them knows where the other lives or works) to the modern relevance of Pascal's Wager, which, as a Catholic, Jean-Louis dismisses as mathematical hope, while Vidal, a Marxist philosophy professor, takes as cue to assume that history is not meaningless. It is at this point that I should interject with something of an assertion that, despite the way that I am describing the "action" of the film, My Night at Maud's is never monotonous or uninteresting. Rohmer famously cares a great deal about the dialogue in his films, but that doesn't mean he's any less attentive to the visual aspect of his work than, say, Bresson. For one thing, Néstor Almendros's luminous black-and-white photography turns the city of Clermont-Ferrand and its surrounding provinces into a distinctly cinematic space that is always a marvel to look at. Also, Rohmer's ability to craft scenes of considerable length is something deeper than just a good ear for narrative and dialogue, as is importantly the case with the centerpiece of the film, an extraordinary, forty-minute sequence on which the success of the film hinges. After midnight mass on Christmas Eve, Vidal convinces Jean-Louis to accompany him to the house of a friend, the charming and enigmatic divorcée Maud (Françoise Fabian), a pediatrician every bit as articulate as her two guests. The three, while also taking the time to drink and eat dessert, mostly converse; about Jean-Louis's Catholicism, which strikes both Vidal and Maud as a bit odd, about Pascal, whom they've all read but understand in different ways, and about love affairs, both of the past (Vidal recalls Jean-Louis's mistresses) and the present (they both assume, correctly, that Jean-Louis is in love at that very moment, probably with a blonde). The brilliance of this scene and of the film as a whole is to be found, perhaps, in the fact that none of these three subjects--religion, philosophy, love--is mutually exclusive. In My Night at Maud's, the matters of the spirirt, the mind, and the heart can't ever be truly separate (as Jean-Louis makes explicitly clear several times); they have to coexist in the same person and inform his or her decisions at any given moment.
After spending the night at Maud's (and I don't think I'm spoiling anything by mentioning that nothing happens between the two), Jean-Louis runs into the blonde, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Françoise, and they agree to go out to lunch together the next day after mass. Now, it's already enough of a coincedence that he ran into her not long after leaving Maud's apartment, but that same day, after coming back from a trip to the mountains with Vidal and Maud, Jean-Louis sees Françoise again and he offers her a ride home, which, as it happens, is close to where he lives. Jean-Louis, a believer in some sort of predestination, often remarks that his choices have always been easy, that he's been lucky in this sense. Without saying too much about the way the rest of the film plays out, I should mention that this interaction between chance or luck and the choice to live one's life according to rigid moral stances makes the ending of the film one of the most moving I've ever seen.
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