My Night at Maud’s

My Night at Maud's (1969) is the third of Éric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales", and it brought the most cerebral of the New Wave directors his widest acclaim, including two Academy Award nominations, a rare thing for a film this talky and this intellectual. Rohmer's cinema of conversation and conscience is nowhere purer than here.

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the reserved Catholic engineer whose plan to marry a pious young woman is complicated by a night spent, chastely, in the apartment of the worldly Maud (Françoise Fabian). The heart of the film is talk: about Pascal's wager and probability, about fidelity and desire. Néstor Almendros shoots it in wintry black and white, in long, patient takes that make a philosophical debate as charged as any seduction, and as tense as a thriller.

Rohmer's insistence that grown-up flirtation and moral reasoning could carry a feature struck a chord far beyond France, and dialogue-driven film-makers from Whit Stillman to Richard Linklater have learned from it. Its wit lies in the gap between what the characters profess and what they actually want. Elegant, intelligent and, in its restrained way, suspenseful, My Night at Maud's shows that few things on screen are as gripping as articulate people arguing about how to live. It is still the most acclaimed of the moral tales, and for most viewers the best place to begin with Rohmer.