It's not often that you find a film director who can effortlessly articulate the woes and triumphs of day-in, day-out love. Eric Rohmer is one member of this rare breed. Having only seen Love in the Afternoon prior to My Night at Maud's you could hardly call me a nerd for Rohmer films, but I can already tell why he's garnered such a prestigious reputation. The man is just so damn good at plucking buried emotions and profound realizations from the mundane existence of domestic life. His primary focus is the relationships between men and women, but he also shows how those relationships effect personally held philosophies and religious beliefs. He pulls these observations down and presents them with a thoughtful, breezy confidence that leaves you both curious and affected.
My Night at Maud's is foremost a love/hate letter to Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician and philosopher. I'll tell you right out of the gate that I don't know very much about Pascal. I thought it would make for an interesting (and much more honest) review relating what I learned about his ideas in the movie to the narrative itself.
The film focuses on a Catholic engineer, Jean-Louis, as he tries to reconcile the whims of his romantic life with the strictures of his faith. Splitting his time between work and church, Jean-Louis comes across a young woman, Francoise, during a night at mass. Despite knowing nothing about her, Jean-Louis is instantly enamored with Francoise and secretly vows to marry her. Before he can ask her out, an old friend, Vidal, invites Jean-Louis over to the apartment of Maud, a recently divorced woman looking for a bit of excitement.
The film has a distinct mode of pacing, going from successions of short scenes to drawn out sequences and back again. Jean-Louis' intrepid desire to marry Francoise is summed up quickly, while his night with Maud stretches its feet and lingers. Naturally, this is done to emphasize the importance of the discussions being had, rather than action driving the plot steadily forward. It's almost as if Rohmer wants to get plot out of the way so he can sit you down, pour you a nice glass of milk, and let loose an avalanche of deeply pondered ideas.
Pascal seems to always be on the tip of Jean-Louis' tongue, however, his love or hatred of the man is never made completely clear. As Jean-Louis stays up with Maud on the titular night in question, the two discuss at length the rigors of love, morality and compromise through the lens of the philosopher. Though both characters tend to be racked by dualities, Maud holds to the notion that love based on religion is a sham and she questions the validity of Jean-Louis' passion for Francoise. Jean-Louis maintains that, while he isn't a perfect Catholic due to his various affairs in the past, he knows without a doubt that love, sex and faith are inextricably bound.
Jean-Louis asserts that Pascal shunned intellectual diversions (mathematics) in favor of his faith to God, finding passion in tangibility rather than abstract ideas. In this sense, Jean-Louis' tangibility is a woman that he loves for her faith and conviction before the indulgence of her sexuality. His diversions are the women he ran with in the past, the idea that he found out too late that he was wasting his time with them when he could have been pursuing something meaningful. Maud finds Jean-Louis' ideas intriguing but reminds him that marriage is far from perfection, having gone through a divorce with an unfaithful man. The morning after provides the crux of the entire film, Jean-Louis laying next to Maud in the most defiantly platonic fashion. There is a brief moment where Jean-Louis nearly gives in to Maud's charms, going into kiss her, but at that point Maud has had enough of the indecision wrought by his conflicting morality.
This particular scene is the centerpiece and the soul of My Night at Maud's. It acutely captures the combination of stuffy intellectual posturing and poignant emotional observations that make up the bulk of the film's dialogue. Whenever the dialogue feels like it's about to go jerk itself long and hard, a heavy, tactile set of lines are delivered to anchor the whole thing back into reality. This way, Rohmer gets to express his views on religion, love, morality and Pascal while maintaining a palpable intimacy. My Night at Maud's is essentially one of the best proponents for late night conversation, where all those woozy but profoundly expressive thoughts are formed.
