MY NIGHT WITH MAUD

Having watched 'Hamnet' at the BFI one afternoon I was hoping that this 1969 film by French director Eric Rohmer would be less draining, and indeed it turned out to complement the earlier film perfectly in that it has no emotional intensity but it entertains the intellect in a pleasingly Gallic manner. 

It's a stereotypical French film in which the four characters sit around smoking and drinking and talking about the meaning of life and about love affairs.  They throw around terms like 'Jansenist' as though everyone will know what it means - I didn't and I consider myself reasonably well educated.

There's a lot of discussion about 'Pascal's wager', which is something I had heard of.  

Essentially Pascal argued that even if you thought that the probability of Christianity being true was very, very small it would still be rational to believe in it since the rewards if it were true were infinitely great.  

At a stretch maybe you could extend the argument to say that if you're going to believe in something, however unlikely (for example that a particular person is your soul mate), then you should fully commit to that belief.

That might sum up the position of the main character, Jean-Louis, a man in his thirties who has had several love affairs that he committed to fully, and who is dismissive of 'brief encounters'.  At the start of the film we see him pursuing a young woman he sees in church who he is convinced he will marry.

The bulk of the film takes place during the early hours of the morning in the apartment of Maud, a divorcee and friend of Vidal, an old acquaintance of Jean-Louis who he has just bumped into that evening.

They sit around and talk, but with an underlying sexual tension present.  Vidal it turns out has slept with Maud once, and although it seems that they are now just good friends it is possible that he still has feelings for her.  Maud on the other hand appears to be interested in Jean-Louis.

At one point she changes out of her normal clothes into a large T-shirt which doesn't leave a lot to the imagination.  Eventually Vidal leaves and because it is snowing heavily Maud suggests that Jean-Louis stays overnight in her spare room.

Except that there is no spare room and Maud makes it clear she'd be very happy for Jean-Louis to share her bed.

I guess because Jean-Louis is fixated on the woman he saw in church, he resists Maud's advances.  Rather farcically she spends the night naked under the bed clothes, whilst he sleeps next to her on top of the bed clothes, still dressed, and with a blanket wrapped around him for extra protection.

The next day he bumps into the woman from the church, Françoise, and, again because of the weather, Jean-Louis spends the night at her place, except on this occasion he is in the spare room for the duration.

We then jump forward some five years, when Jean -Louis and Françoise are indeed married, with a small child.  They bump into Maud at the beach, and there is a short, fairly innocuous  conversation between her and Jean-Louis.  The film ends with Jean-Louis realising that the reason that there is some tension between Maud and Françoise is that the latter had had an affair with Maud's ex-husband, which had contributed to Maud's divorce.

The film is part of a series of films planned by Rohmer entitled 'Six Moral Tales'.  According to my AI friend the moral of this particular tale revolves around the conflict between faith/reason and desire/chance.  So at its most simplistic level Jean-Louis represents the former and Maud, the latter?  

That's as far as I'm prepared to go in analysing what this film is about.  But even if a lot of it went over my head I loved every minute of it.