Word: rohmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...THIS is all too comprehensible: hopelessly incomplete, a summary of a summary. If this were all Rohmer wanted to say he would have put out a circular. Instead, he made a film...
...Rohmer achieves a visual purity and a unity of image and material that come close to constituting scientific proof, extending even to the surface flavor of the film: here is an exquisitely controlled work about exquisite control. While Jean-Louis is in the process of formulating his relation to the world, the director places him in a position facing, confronting everything. 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...
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...