Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Hitchcoc As the young protagonist, a Catholic with a precise set of morals, jousts with his friend about Pascal and his belief that we must embrace religion because it's the safest course, we see what I would call a failure to meet life head on. I never found this guy an attractive character because he was so caught up in his righteousness. When he meets Maude, who could have been a wonderful addition to his life, he is so full of "morality" that he passes her by. One can be dead without the physical act of dying. Apparently, the women he encountered in the past grew tired of his sense of perfection. Maude does everything to entice him and he ends up in an embrace that he rejects. At that moment his very sterility is exposed. He has the hots for a pretty young woman who goes to his church, Francoise, whom he pretty much stalks. She is right for him. She is pretty but also quite dull. Rohmer shows us he one can win in some respects but ultimately lose.

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) This film can be looked upon from different point of views. The key moment is when Jean Louis is sleeping in the same bed as Maud, and she starts coming on to him and he rejects her, but we can understand that it is out of principles and not because he is not attracted to her. Jean Louis is a religious man, fascinated by Pascal's writings relative to faith, infinite and betting. He falls in love at the beginning of the film, in church, with the blonde Françoise, without even talking to her. To have a sexual relationship with Maud would be a betrayal to this love. Maud is a woman who lives her life intensively, and is an atheist and to her Jean Louis's repression would mean missing out on life. By making this repressive choice Jean Louis will eventually be able to have a love relationship with Françoise , which was his aim. To a spectator which shares Maud's thoughts, Jean Louis is missing life and conforming himself to bourgeois's values. But for those who identify with Jean Louis, he got his great reward , from abstaining , which he did out of faith and principles, not even knowing the outcome. A very intellectually stimulating film with excellent performances, specially Françoise Fabien and Marie Christine Barrault.

jcappy 8 Ambiguity Preferable?It's hard to speak about "My Nigh at Maud's" in words other than those of praise for its filmic qualities... but how's about taking on meaning. Either this film is pretty ambiguous or I'm missing something. Whether one dissects its parts or observes it whole, it remains ambiguous. So, isn't ambiguity a good thing? Yes, if its recognition leads to meaning, action, truths. No, if it is simply escape, fence-sitting, or art-for-art's sake. But is Rohmer's masterpiece as ambiguous as it appears? My guess is that it's not. Rohmer sets up these distinct dichotomies between religion/piety and atheism/freedom, light and dark, and men and women. He seems somewhat more sympathetic toward the latter, but a proponent of the former. Perhaps he stands with the preacher for whom Christianity is a "way of life," and "an adventure of sanctity." But isn't Rohmer left behind when his priest adds that it "takes madness to become a saint?" I say this because the film's ending casts a firm vote for form over freedom. But his move away from ambiguity in the direction of form--as opposed to freedom, seems to detract from his genuine classic. For its Rohmer's solipsisms (sex, love, marriage) that present the problem. First, his central character's role is undermined by these. Jean-Louis is initially an absorbing character, a provincial intellectual, with an air of world travel, and independence. There is no dis-juncture between him and the incredibly effective mise en scene. He is as particular a man in a very specific place--as is his friend, Vidal, the suave philosophy professor. They breathe the air of this provincial world--and such a rare treat: intellectuals with holds on themselves occupying film space. But Jean-Louis's distinction begins to slip early and slides (incidentally, so does Vidal's and for similar reasons) during his night at Maud's. There's something about the way he chases Francoise--it seems too mundane, too breezy and somewhat obtuse--as if he's quickly morphing into the default French male. But he does make comebacks--that is, before setting foot in Maud's apartment. The problem, however, isn't Maud's--his holy water piety or self-righteousness are not at issue--nor is Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance because he fits the original character perfectly. It's the role. He has not only made a generic male but, more specifically, a Rohmer male--one who exists to experience moral tests via a Rohmer type female who is seductive (always leggy) wily, sophisticated at least in the ways of sex/love/men, and above all, tempting. As unsettling as Maud may be (see below) again it's the role that takes him out of character, not Maud. He loses his reserve, he becomes too confessional, too awkward--physically and emotionally. He adopts various male postures--the sexually experienced, the wit, the daringly direct, the self-satisfied and he cannot navigate Maud's rather obvious set-up. Whatever he seemed to have had initially has gone the way of passivity, uncertainty, self-absorption, and dependency. He appears a suckling lying across Maud's bed, leaning on his elbow, and gaze-talking into her eyes--then mummy wrapped next to her. And he's lost his warmth (the antithesis of Hitchcock's Father Logan in "I Confess") Yet in spite of all this he will, at times, remind of his early identity, and isn't completely overshadowed by Chermont's cityscape. What about the title character, Maud? She's the dark-eyed, black hair, worldly (the atheist) to Francoise, the blond catholic snow queen. She too is assigned a role, but while Jean-Louis' is irreversible, hers is reversible---because it cannot contain her longings. However, her expansive identity is not a winning one because it is achieved outside Rohmer's closed box of marriage, love, and sex (her uncomfortably warm apartment, within which even the Marxist Vidal succumbs) The price of her emotional range, values, freedom, romantic leanings is depressing solitude and broken marriages. But what she gets for playing the role of game mistress, temptress, and mediator to men's moral quests, is a chance to expose in these men more than they bargain for. They have to deal with her own acute ambivalence about her roles and also with her uncontrolled consciousness--she would never be among the bevy of girls who Gandhi slept with to test his chastity. She's a witness to men's pretenses, "lack of spontaneity," "stiffness," secretiveness, clinical intelligence--and, yes, their so-called moral victories. In other words, Maud sounds like the point of view character (and this, for me, is the chief reason for the ambiguity I first referred to). But she's not. She is simply being used as a challenging argument against freedom, and as a mediator of male form and morality. She is free at her own peril--and carries the stigma of freedom. Which she continues to bear 5 years later in terms of isolation and disappointment in love. She alone is not privy to the infinite compositional shot of Jean-Louis, his pre-selected bride Francois, and their son embracing the beachscape of salvation, their principles of faith, love, and marriage intact. For Rohmer's lens turns away from those who do not even care to wager on his fabricated, established forms.

MisterWhiplash My Night at Maud's is a "talky" film, though like the main character of Jean-Louis in going after the woman to marry this actually is a perception that is on face-value a little demeaning. This is such a rich screenplay because it takes its characters seriously and honestly, and there's nothing cheating in dealing with characters who have problems in confronting how to approach emotional contact, of using religion as a guise, or trying to follow a 'code of conduct' (as one French critic called it on the Criterion DVD of the film) that leads into a complex and troubling end. Even more-so than Love in the Afternoon, this is a work where the male perspective must have the counterpoint of a woman who is much more vibrant and life-affirming by not being connected to a kind of constricting religious ideology that can't really lead to anywhere aside from compromise. Jean-Louis is such a man who sees blonde Francoise (Stardust Memories' Barrault) riding on a motorcycle and decides right then that she will be the one he will marry. His is an idealized love where despite saying that he's been in love and relationships before he has not had to really make a leap into a consequential decision.The philosophical arguments involved with Jean-Louis, Francoise and even with Maud, of whom Jean-Louis has a pensive and indecisive fling over the course of 24 hours, can last for quite a while after film's end, which is a major credit to Rohmer in making these characters real within the specific contexts. They may be bourgeois, or close to it, but the concerns of the characters are universal: How does one make a leap from emotional experience to belief. Or on the flip-side how does one who probably doesn't have any belief either way (watch Francoise's eyes when she goes with Jean-Louis to church, it's an exceptionally subtly acted scene) and has to fall into a kind of false love, where because she already knows of the image that Jean-Louis already has of her before she says a word that she has to continue it, marry him, have a child, and live with his own moral insecurities? The ending may seem clean-cut, but it's a lot more complex as a sort of continuing cycle. Marriages are formed and bonds made between people all the time when there is no love, but what might be a reason? This isn't Rohmer's central point perhaps, but it's an intelligent posit that is right there in Rohmer's character study.And all the while, through Rohmer's simple direction- the only big stylistic choice, perhaps important in the Bergman sense, is the use of the landscape of winter and the mainstream conformity of Christmas- he gets great performances from his actors, as if in a play all working towards the cores of the character in order that all of the at-times heavy dialog comes off in a fairly approachable light. Rarely will you get Pascal and romance thrown together into a conversation, but it works in this case, and for someone who's only known Pascal from a triangle it's enlightening to see how moral choice, of probability and chance, come out in ways that leap from one place to another but always coherently in the scenes at Maud's apartment. There's a good deal under the surface that comes out little by little, and if one can give in to the rhythm of Rohmer's characters the rewards are just as satisfying as with other more flamboyant works by Rohmer's contemporaries. It may not be Jules and Jim, but in its own disquieting way it's just as powerful in the implications drawn from the characters, particularly long after the film ends. A+