Christmas with Rohmer: My Night at Maud’s (1969)

“That Monday, December 21st, I suddenly knew, without a doubt, that Françoise would be my wife,” protagonist Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) declares in voiceover near the beginning of Éric Rohmer’s 1969 film My Night at Maud’s. Unlike the preceding entries in the director’s Six Moral Tales series, My Night at Maud’s — officially the third tale, though it was shot and released fourth due to scheduling conflicts — eschews narration almost entirely, rendering this statement all the more noteworthy. It’s also quite surprising, in that he doesn’t actually know Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault).

Advertisement

Storytelling: The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963)

“My intent was to film not raw, unvarnished events but rather the account of them as given by one of the characters,” Éric Rohmer wrote in the companion book to his Six Moral Tales series. “The story, the selection and arrangement of the facts, as well as the way they were learned, happened to relate very clearly and specifically to the person relating them, independently of any pressures I might exert on that person. One of the reasons these tales are called ‘moral’ is that they are effectively stripped of physical action: everything takes place in the narrator’s mind. The same story, told by someone else, would be quite different, or might well not have been told at all.” His 1963 film The Bakery Girl of Monceau, the first entry in the series, exemplifies this approach in a compact twenty-three minutes.

Dans la rue

One of the many things I enjoy about French New Wave movies is seeing people look directly at the camera. I’m not talking about the final shots of The 400 Blows and Breathless; I mean ordinary people who are walking down the street, going about their daily lives, and suddenly notice that someone is shooting a film. Street scenes were a vital part of the nouvelle vague style. Jean Douchet devotes an entire chapter of his book French New Wave to them, in which he explains that they were both a means of saving money and an act of rebellion against the studio system. He then talks about the effect on extras:

Extras dominated film sets throughout the world. As a trade union they took advantage of the corporatism of the other film unions to obtain jobs. Extras were everywhere and no one was spared their presence. What was most typical of the extras of the time (they could still be seen in films by Mizoguchi and even in Bresson’s Pickpocket of 1959), was their total and well-known lack of naturalness. Motionless, they posed, ‘expressed’ themselves, and had no other ambition than to be seen. They got in the way of the modern filmmaker and interfered with the audience’s involvement in the film. By shooting on location, which overturned the rules of the studio, they were thrust outside the camera’s field of view. And as in the films of Lumière and Griffith, the great silent films or the first talkies (1930-1933), Renoir (Boudu or La Chienne), Vigo, Barnet, the impression of life once again swept across the screen. When people were needed for a scene (a café, newsstand, bus stop), friends were used, or friends of friends, or even passersby who were willing to give an hour or two of their time. It not only lent an air of truth to the film, it was fun as well.