My Night At Maud's
French director Eric Rohmer, former critic andCahiers du Cinemaeditor, created a very special romantic film series around the difficult choices men make when they fall in love with two women called "Six Moral Tales."My Night at Maud'swas the third entry, and it was so well received in 1969 that it gave Rohmer international prominence. To this day, it remains Rohmer's masterpiece, a brilliantly insightful and sublime meditation on adult indiscretions. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a chaste engineer who thinks he's met his soul mate in church (Marie-Christine Barrault), yet winds up accidentally spending the night with the seductive Maud (Francoise Fabian), who is more his intellectual equal. Filmed in stark black and white by Nestor Almendros, this is one of those rare films in which questions about philosophy translate into unexpected answers about the heart. It's slow and methodical, but well worth the experience.--Bill Desowitz