A devout Catholic man's rigid principles are challenged during a one-night stay with Maud, a divorced woman with an outsize personality.A devout Catholic man's rigid principles are challenged during a one-night stay with Maud, a divorced woman with an outsize personality.A devout Catholic man's rigid principles are challenged during a one-night stay with Maud, a divorced woman with an outsize personality.
- Nominated for 2 Oscars
- 6 wins & 6 nominations total
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Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaJean-Louis Trintignant's character is never called by name in the entire film. He is shown in credits as "Jean-Louis."
- GoofsWhen Jean-Louis Trintignant accepts to climb into bed with Françoise Fabian, he motions for her to pass him the blanket, extending his right hand holding a lit cigarette. The next shot from the side shows him grasping the blanket with a cigarette-free right hand.
- Quotes
Jean-Louis: Are you still a Marxist?
Vidal: Absolutely. For a Communist, Pascal's wager is very relevant today. Personally, I very much doubt that history has any meaning. Yet I wager that it has, so I'm in a Pascalian situation. Hypothesis A: Society and politics are meaningless. Hypothesis B: History has meaning. I'm not at all sure B is more likely to be true than A. More likely the reverse. Let's even suppose B has a 10% chance of being true and A has 80%. Nevertheless I have no choice but to opt for B, because only the hypothesis that history has meaning allows me to go on living. Suppose I bet on A, and B was true, despite the lesser odds. I'd have thrown away my life. So I must choose B to justify my life and actions. There's an 80% chance I'm wrong but that doesn't matter.
Jean-Louis: Mathematical hope. Potential gain divided by probability. With your hypothesis B, though the probability is slight, the possible gain is infinite. In your case, a meaning to life. In Pascal's, eternal salvation.
Vidal: It was Gorky, Lenin or maybe Mayakovsky who said about the Russian revolution that the situation forced them to choose the one chance in a thousand. Because hope became infinitely greater if you took that chance than if you didn't take it.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)
After Vidal leaves, Maud tells Jean-Louis about her marriage, her ex-husband's Catholic mistress, and the tragic end to her affair with the only man she truly loved. When he is persuaded to avoid a snowstorm and stay overnight, Jean-Louis has to overcome Maud's advances and his own temptations to remain faithful to his ideal mate, a blond, Catholic girl (Marie-Christine Barrault) he recently met at church.
This was the first film I'd seen by Eric Rohmer and it was a puzzle to penetrate the uniqueness of his style and rhythm. Rohmer presents his characters in very natural, almost mundane situations, and heightens the realism by using only natural sounds of the environment. On the surface, the film appears very simple but underneath there is much complexity. Jean-Louis is conflicted between his Catholic principles and his love of sensual pleasure. He lives in a world centered almost entirely on himself, engaging in much philosophizing about choice but never choosing. He operates out of how he "should" or "should not" act rather than out of his experience of what works. When life does not fit his pictures, he deceives himself with endless rationalizations. Through his experience with Maud, however, he is shaken out of need for complete self-control and discovers the epiphany of grace.
Rohmer has a light touch and employs intelligent and witty dialogue to bring his characters to life. In the process, he creates an impersonal elegance that is totally captivating. Rohmer doesn't set out to change our lives just to make us think, and in My Night at Maud's, he succeeds admirably.
- howard.schumann
- Oct 28, 2002
Details
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- Also known as
- Noc kod gospodjice Mod
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Box office
- Gross worldwide
- $4,793
- Runtime1 hour 45 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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