My Night at Maud’s by Eric Rohmer (1969)

The narrator of the film, who is also the protagonist, is an engineer at the Michelin tire plant in Clermont-Ferrand. Since his name is never heard in the film, it has become customary to refer to the main character by the actor’s name, “Jean-Louis.” Having worked for several years in Canada and South America, Jean-Louis has only been back in his native region for two months. Just before Christmas, we see him one Sunday at mass, where he notices a young blond woman whom he doesn’t know. He suddenly decides that this young woman will be his wife. However, he has trouble meeting her to make his feelings known.

Jean-Louis’s hobby is mathematics, and he is particularly interested in calculating probabilities. While browsing in a bookstore in Clermont after mass one day, he happens upon a copy of Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (ca. 1660) and buys it. Later, upon entering a brasserie, he meets Vidal, an old friend from high school who has become a Marxist philosophy professor at the University of Clermont. While dining together they discuss probabilities (the statistical probability of their meeting, for example), and in this context Pascal’s famous “wager,” which concerns betting for or against the existence of God. The next evening Vidal takes Jean-Louis to a lady friend’s apartment for dinner. He is clearly in love with the lady, whose name is Maud, but they don’t get along well enough, he explains, even to consider getting married. Maud is a pediatrician, recently divorced and the mother of a little girl. She belongs to an old Clermont family of freethinkers. An atheist, Maud is visibly amused to spar with a practicing Catholic like Jean-Louis. At dinner they talk about religion and especially about Pascal. Jean-Louis disapproves of Pascal’s Jansenist morality, which is so severe that it even condemns good food.

After dinner Maud and Vidal, convinced that Jean-Louis has a girl friend, kid him about his love life. He denies steadfastly that there is any woman in his life. Vidal invents a pretext to go home, leaving Jean-Louis alone with Maud, who urges him to stay the night to avoid driving home in a snowstorm. In the following conversation Maud confides that her husband and she both had had love affairs, her husband with a young Catholic girl that Maud had insisted he stop seeing. Maud’s lover died in an accident when his car slipped on an icy road. When Maud goes to bed, Jean-Louis realizes that there is no guest room. He rolls himself up in a cover and stretches out in an armchair, resisting the obvious seduction attempt on the part of the young woman. Towards dawn he nonetheless lies down beside her on the bed to sleep. He soon finds himself in Maud’s arms and begins to kiss her before tearing himself from her embrace. Deeply offended, Maud leaves the bed, after which the hero beats a quick retreat.

Once outside, Jean-Louis sees the blond girl go by on her moped, runs after her and finally speaks to her. The young woman, Françoise, agrees to meet him the next day. During the day Jean-Louis goes for a mountain hike in the snow with Maud and Vidal (and Vidal’s date), then meets Françoise by chance in the city that evening. Since it is snowing and the roads are treacherous, he convinces her to let him drive her to the student residence in the suburbs where she lives. When Jean-Louis’s car gets stuck in the snow and ice, Françoise invites him to spend the night in an empty room in her dormitory apartment. The next morning, when Jean-Louis becomes romantic, she is reticent. She finally explains to him, some time afterwards, that she had just broken off an affair with a married man with whom she was deeply in love. She doesn’t feel worthy of Jean-Louis’s love. To calm her scruples, he tells her that the morning they met he had just spent the night with another woman. When Jean-Louis again tries to contact Maud, with whom he had developed a warm relationship, he discovers that she has left Clermont to begin a new pediatric practice in Toulouse.

Five years later Jean-Louis and Françoise are on vacation at the seashore with their little boy. They run into Maud, who has remarried. Jean-Louis is surprised to learn that the two women already know each other and notices that Françoise is quite embarrassed by the meeting. After a short discussion with Maud, he rejoins his wife on the beach and explains to her that it was with Maud that he had spent the night just before meeting her. He is on the point of confessing that nothing had happened between them when he suddenly understands that the young Catholic woman with whom Maud’s ex-husband had had an affair was none other than Françoise. He decides therefore not to reveal to his wife that Maud was not his mistress.