Word: maud
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...films of French Director Eric Rohmer are so literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov...
Some of the chosen eponyms are familiar: the sandwich was once an earl; the pompadour a king's mistress; sadism originated with the Marquis de Sade. Many more are likely to surprise: maud lin is the old vernacular form of (Mary) Magdalene, usually pictured weeping: Jules Leotard was a 19th century trapeze artist; mausoleum derives from the tomb of "the wily satrap" Mausolus, in Turkey; and tawdry comes from the cheap souvenirs sold at the shrine of a 7th century Anglo-Saxon princess who was called St. Audrey...
...knee, actually. Or so says Author-Director Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud's). As always, Rohmer remains resolutely out of style. People go to bed and talk-only talk-the whole night through. The quarry always contrives to keep the pursuer in view. Politesse is stressed; sexual desire hovers about conversations, but some things are just not spoken in mixed company...
...Nuit Chez Maud. Eric Rohmer wrote and directed this drama about the basic choices people make to determine the quality of their lives. Set in a claustrophobic French town and loaded with conversation about Pascal and Catholicism, this movie is so well done that it makes all its points in the camera work and in the performances of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Francoise Fabian. The involved dialogue is merely an added...
...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 has made predictable and obvious. An imperfect system, perhaps? Human error? The dialectic never ends...