Word: chez
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more than a curiosity, however, Ma Nuit Chez Maud achieves its power through an aesthetic structure vastly more engaging than mere portraiture. Its first-person narrative frame forces you to share the experience of Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) through his visual point of view (also brief interior monologues), subtly builds up a tension between your sensibility and your experience of his, and finally forces a dialectical confrontation in sequence after sequence with the ultimately desirable Maud (Francoise Fabian), where his choices directly thwart your inclinations to act through him. Rohmer uses this audience identification with the human reality...
...Nuit Chez Maud exists simultaneously on both of these levels and depends on the tension between them, a kind of inverted love story that's interesting mainly for the reasons the love doesn't come off, which are metaphysical, contradictory, and above all, intellectual. A knowledge of Pascal seems important in sorting out patterns of thought, since the sophisticated conversations ("you're more of a Jansenist than I am") are often elliptical, but don't be put off: with Rohmer, as with his New Wave cohorts, academic expertise is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding his intellectuality. Most...
...narrow milieu does not only limit, however; it also increases the probability of the chance encounters on which the narrative of Ma Nuit Chez Maud is based. Jean-Louis counts on chance. luck. And his luck is good because he scientifically applies his will to it, as when he picks up his wife-to-be with the full intention of marrying her. Comprehending his possibilities and limitations, he can neither renounce the world and become a saint, nor marry Maud. who is a free-thinker. Either way, to want everything or nothing, you've got to be crazy...
Through confusing academic discourse Rohmer leaves you with a murky residue, what Godard has called "a fabric of contradictions" between consciousness and action. Like See You At Mao, Ma Nuit Chez Mand is about "finding the right line" through the chaos, be it political or moral. Both films, however, resist solutions as well. How complete a human clarity is possible remains always questionable. With all his worrying about how to live, about his personal beliefs and his clear conscience, Jean-Louis fails to make an important human perception about the connection between Maud and Francoise, which his scientific outlook...
Early in the 1960s, Quebec's Premier Jean Lesage vowed to make Quebeckers the maîtres chez nous (masters in our own house) within the Federation. By 1968, René Lévesque, once a member of Lesage's Cabinet, helped found the Parti Québecois, which demanded political separation from Canada. Last spring, Lévesque's party won 24% of Quebec's vote in provincial elections...