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In a period when makers of tony romantic comedies were scrambling for credible ways to delay their characters' making love, the austere French writer-director Eric Rohmer, doing what came naturally, hit on religious scruples. His Catholic hero (Jean-Louis Trintignant), steeped in Pascal, bets that holding out for his ideal—blonde, also Catholic—will have a better payoff than dallying with the raven-tressed nonbeliever Maud (Françoise Fabian). The movie's centrepiece and high point is his night at Maud's, a chaste yet ticklish probing of male emotions and convictions. Rohmer and Trintignant create a man who's so fixed on a mental image that he can't appreciate what's in his grasp. While the pale beauty played by Marie-Christine Barrault fits his ideal, it's Maud—initially intriguing, ultimately haunting—who leaves vibrations in her wake, partly because Fabian is so flesh-tingling and sophisticated. Nestor Almendros did the peerless, sensuous black-and-white cinematography.
—Michael Sragow
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Françoise Fabian and Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud's |
