Eric Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud is one of my favourite
films, one I return to every few years, the experience at once always warmly
familiar and subtly evolving. I think much of my pleasure is based in nostalgic
idealism, in the idea of a culture where a conversation even with someone new
is more likely to leap to philosophy and self-analysis than to the usual
establishing banalities – I always think of the film as a kind of tribute to
the examined life. This doesn’t mean that the examination is entirely rational
or consistent – as in many Rohmer films, there’s a recurring sense that much of
what people say about themselves is experimental, put out there to see how it
flies, to find out what alchemy may result from the response. This resonates
fascinatingly against the film’s preoccupation with a Pascalian wager, with the
concept of present sacrifice for the sake of infinite ultimate gain. The
limitations of that concept can be laid out almost endlessly, but without
staining its metaphysical allure, or its (albeit crude) applicability to
romantic commitment – a Pascalian approach to love might almost demand making
the “wrong” choice
of partner, for the sake of alignment with one’s normative philosophical or
cultural benchmarks. The film brilliantly facilitates and interrogates such
thoughts, at once providing a detailed immediate canvas (indelibly capturing
its time and place, the Christmas season in provincial France) and suggesting a
broader one (the protagonist has spent the last fourteen years working in
Canada and Chile, a combination spanning the, how to put it, mundane and exotic?).
The film ultimately draws on a coincidence of the kind that in a less elegant
film would only prompt eye-rolling, but which here serves to confirm the
mysteries of the romantic navigation, while also providing a closure of
gorgeously conceived irony and great humanity, even as it allows its male protagonist one
last opportunity for self-mythologizing.
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