Film: My Night at Maud’s
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
My Night at Maud’s
Director: Eric Rohmer
Cast
| Jean-Louis | Jean-Louis Trintignant |
| Françoise | Marie-Christine Barrault |
| Maud | Françoise Fabian |
| Vidal | Antoine Vitez |
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/436-my-night-at-maud-s-chances-are
By Kent Jones
....In My Night at Maud’s, a man (Trintignant) leaves his home in rural France and attends Mass during the Christmas season. He spots a pretty blonde (Marie-Christine Barrault) and, after the service is finished, hops in his car and follows her on her moped. He loses sight of her but soon explains to us in voice-over that this was the day he knew that Françoise was going to be his wife. Next, we see him at home studying mathematics, then at work during his lunch break. He is an engineer at the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand, and when he mentions that he lives in Ceyrat, one of his co-workers remarks on the distance. That night, he stops in at a bookstore and thumbs through a copy of Pascal’s Pensées, and later runs into his old friend Vidal (Antoine Vitez) in a bar. Both men are struck by the fact that they have met completely by chance and quickly embark on a discussion of probability, which segues into Pascal, which in turn eases into philosophy (Vidal is a professor), which is a hop, skip, and a jump to Marxism (Vidal is a Marxist) and Christianity (Trintignant’s unnamed character—we’ll call him Jean-Louis—is a practicing Catholic). Vidal invites Jean-Louis to a Léonide Kogan concert, where there will be “lots of pretty girls,” and then insists that on Christmas night he accompany him to the home of a certain Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced woman and good friend with whom, he claims, he occasionally keeps company. His ostensible reason for asking Jean-Louis to accompany him is that he’s afraid that he and Maud will sleep together out of boredom if they’re left alone.
So,
we have a sense of place (the Auvergne region) and a time of year
(Christmas). We know that Jean-Louis is a Catholic, that he is a loner
who lives far from where he works, that he enjoys intellectual pursuits
and has a particular interest in theories of probability. We also know,
via the curt narration, that he is fairly single-minded (he has decided
he’s found the girl of his dreams after a couple of quick glances in
church) and that the story we’re watching is in the past tense. We are
also primed to accept chance as a major factor, given the manner in
which Jean-Louis has spotted Françoise and run into his old friend, not
to mention the discussions of Pascal. From there, we’re on to Maud’s
house, where everything is turned upside down and inside out.
It
is a common misconception that too much dialogue can sink a movie, which
is in turn based on the equally common misconception that dialogue is
always a forum for direct communication—the kind of dialogue easily
found on television or in the majority of commercial films. In Rohmer’s
cinema, talk is never just talk and is always a form of indirect action.
For Jean-Louis, it is, or becomes, a means of endless postponement. And
then there is the crucial matter of the actor who’s speaking the
dialogue. There are some things that can be imparted to us easily,
without contrivance, by means of narrative exposition. There are other
things that cannot. And Rohmer’s knowledge of the difference between the
two is one of the many rare qualities that make him such a great
filmmaker. Casting is always important, but in Rohmer it is essential.
Careful exposition allows us to see all the exterior traits of
Jean-Louis—Catholic, intellectual, engineer, former womanizer, etc. But
all the exposition in the world would not allow us to see his reticence,
referred to in the dialogue long after we’ve noted it (consciously or
not) in Trintignant’s comportment, his way of imparting himself one
little bit at a time. Rohmer is not the only filmmaker who has mined
this trait in Trintignant—it certainly served Bernardo Bertolucci in The
Conformist, and it has also worked well for André Téchiné, Truffaut,
and Krzysztof Kieslowski. But it is employed in those other films for
its sinister edge under extreme melodramatic conditions, while in My Night at Maud’s
it is the ordinary trait of a fairly common type of man seen under
unremarkable everyday circumstances. Rohmer almost always works with
good actors, and Trintignant is no exception. But the core of his
presence here is something that is more or less unactable, which puts
the film closer to Bresson than one might think. In other words, who
Trintignant is, as opposed to his considerable ability as an actor, sits
at the heart of this character and this film.
In order for such
a strategy to work, nothing can be heightened, and to be sure, nothing
ever is heightened in Rohmer’s work. Observation always takes precedence
over amplification. A very simple example would be the scene where
Maud’s daughter, Marie (played by Marie Becker, Fabian’s own daughter,
by Jacques Becker), wakes up and asks her mother if she can look at the
lights on the Christmas tree. Maud plugs in the lights, the girl has a
look, and then she goes back to bed. Most filmmakers would cut to a
point-of-view shot of the lights and back to an expression of wonder on
the girl’s face; they would probably also take great care to ensure that
the viewer shared in the wonder by framing the shot of the tree so that
it became a vision, the Christmas tree. In Rohmer’s film, it’s all done
in one medium-shot, and the everyday luminousness of Almendros’s
imagery isn’t even slightly jacked up on behalf of the tree or the girl.
Rohmer never disrupts the flow of our attention with such shifts, and
this allows us an unusual opportunity to scrutinize his characters’
every move. Believability and plausibility at the most minute level are
key characteristics of Rohmer’s films—in this case, how single people in
their thirties, living in the provinces, behave when they’re alone, how
they move, what they talk about, how they draw each other out and
defend themselves from self-exposure. As long as you’re not hankering
for someone to draw a knife or make a declaration, this provides the way
toward a remarkable form of suspense.
What exactly transpires
between Maud and Jean-Louis? One way of looking at the film is to see
Jean-Louis as a man who plays it safe, rejecting Pascal’s wager by
refusing to bet on the possibility of infinite happiness with Maud and
banking on a less exciting woman who happens to represent his ideal
type. In one sense, this describes My Night at Maud’s to
perfection. But on another, deeper level, this is a story of chance—real
chance versus ideal chance. “I love surprises,” proclaims Jean-Louis,
and just as he is throughout much of the movie, he’s telling himself and
the people around him a story. He acknowledges his “reticence,” but he
is finally reticent in a way that even he doesn’t fully comprehend.
Running into Vidal is a matter of chance. Finding a woman who conforms
to his own preconception is not, the probability being exceptionally
high that he would eventually meet a woman such as Françoise (especially
high in church, since he’s in search of a good Catholic). Maud is not
simply a woman of an alternate type—brunette, Protestant
(nonpracticing), vivacious, “fast”—she is potentially an agent of
transformation. She spends the night listening to two men tell stories
about Marxism and Catholicism and Pascal, as articulate as they are
indirect in their actions. Vidal tells Jean-Louis that he wants him to
come along to save him from sleeping with Maud, but Maud reveals that
Vidal is in love with her and that he brought Jean-Louis along as a kind
of test; Jean-Louis insists that he wants to go but allows himself to
be talked into staying the night because of the snow, then into moving
ever closer to Maud’s bed, and finally into it. Jean-Louis thinks he’s
revealing himself with all his talk about Catholicism and the sacrament
of marriage, but Maud knows that it’s nothing but a barrier, the kind of
barrier that men put up in order to shield themselves from the
necessity of direct action. By Jean-Louis’ lights, Maud has opened a
door through which he is afraid to walk for fear of jeopardizing his
resolve. By Maud’s lights, Jean-Louis has already walked through the
door and into the room, literally and figuratively, and his resolve and
beliefs amount to nothing but impediments to recognizing and negotiating
immediate reality. What are the chances that Jean-Louis and Maud will
have a life together? Based on her luck with men and his avowed
preference for Catholic blondes, not so great. Based on their immediate
affinity for each other, not so small. “You are a happy soul, despite
appearances,” observes Maud of Jean-Louis—and the essential rightness of
this observation is what makes Rohmer a greater artist than Bertolucci
and also points to what gives My Night at Maud’s its special spark and effervescence, which, it must be admitted, is not present in every Rohmer film.
Current
fashion would favor Maud as the voice of reason when she tartly
dismisses Jean-Louis’ prevarications: “I prefer people who know what
they want.” Yet there’s something equally admirable about Jean-Louis’
insistence on adhering to his story and fulfilling his own platonic
conception with Françoise, a decidedly unhappy soul. The necessity of
choice, the pain of choice: no film is better at illuminating these two
equally real aspects of living. There are no moments of grace in My Night at Maud’s, at least nothing like Natacha’s discovery of the missing necklace in A Tale of Springtime (1990), the appearance of the green ray, or the unexpected climactic return of the long-lost Charles in A Tale of Winter (such moments, along with the singular and singularly curious case of 1978’s Perceval,
are the only indications of Catholicism in Rohmer’s own authorial
viewpoint, at least to my mind). Yet there are intimations of grace in
the slow, serpentine movement toward intimacy between Maud and
Jean-Louis.
Rohmer’s films offer us an exceptionally vivid
picture of how we navigate the twists and turns that life throws our way
on a daily basis. “All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,” wrote
Oliver Wendell Holmes. “But all the use of life is in specific
solutions.” No artist has expressed this dichotomy more eloquently, or
lovingly, than Eric Rohmer.
Kent Jones is Film Comment’s editor-at-large and a frequent contributor to the magazine, as well as to many other publications around the world.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence