Word: maud
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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...
...Point of view shots take on an austere, dialectical frontality, especially in dialogue sequences where Jean-Louis often speaks off-camera to the image on screen. The mere groupings of figures in a landscape have a definite significance in Rohmer's style. Not until after Trintignant's night with Maud, after he has decided to marry Francoise (whom he hasn't met yet), can he be grouped comfortably with others in a frame. Foggy, wintry outdoors scenes, hazy skylines, and claustrophobic interiors convey the hermetically sealed environment within which he must construct his life. Only after considerable resolution...
...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...
...screened in the Boston area. Definite booking has already been made for Glauber Rocha's "Antonio das Mortes" and "Black God, White Devil," Jean Marie Straub's "The Chronicle of Anna Magdelena Bach," and Bertolucci's "The Partner." There is also a possibility that Rohmer's "Ma Nuit Chez Maud" will be screened...