Not an action-packed story, but My Night at Maud's became a surprise sensation and commercial success. The film was nominated for two Oscars®, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. Both Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert chose it as one of the ten best films of 1970 (it came out in France a year earlier). Filmmaker Robert Benton chose it as one of his ten favorites of all time.
Why such acclaim? After all, this isn't a rowdy teen comedy but a film where adults mostly talk and they talk about everything from philosophy to Christmas tree lights. (Rohmer claimed that idea came to him because of the restraints during World War Two curfews.) That in itself seems fresh even decades later. As Rohmer said, "The people in my films are not expressing abstract ideas - there is no `ideology' in them, or very little - but revealing what they think about relationships between men and women, about friendship, love, desire, their conception of life, happiness, boredom, work, leisure."
My Night at Maud's came at a transition point for actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (playing Jean-Louis). In the dozen years since his film debut he'd made about 30 films, most of them inconsequential. But now he started working with Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Corbucci and other top directors. But it was the two female leads who apparently really impressed Rohmer. Marie-Christine Barrault (making her debut as the woman in the church) and Francoise Fabian (Maud) would both later appear in Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon.
Director: Eric Rohmer
Producer: Pierre Cottrell, Barbet Schroeder
Screenplay: Eric Rohmer
Cinematography: Nestor Almendros
Editing: Cecile Decugis
Music: Mozart
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Jean-Louis), Francoise Fabian (Maud), Marie-Christine Barrault (Francoise), Antoine Vitez (Vidal).
In French with English subtitles
BW-105m.
by Lang Thompson
