Curator Watchlist
A sharp, talk-driven moral comedy that turns a snowy Christmas encounter into a fascinating debate about faith, desire, and self-deception. It rewards patience with wit, intellectual tension, and one of Rohmer’s most elegant examinations of how people rationalize their choices.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 50m
Director: Éric Rohmer
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Françoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault
The Catholic Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, the Marxist Vidal, in Clermont-Ferrand around Christmas. Vidal introduces Jean-Louis to the modestly libertine, recently divorced Maud and the three engage in conversation on religion, atheism, love, morality and Blaise Pascal's life and writings on philosophy, faith and mathematics. Jean-Louis ends up spending a night at Maud's. Jean-Louis' Catholic views on marriage, fidelity and obligation make his situation a dilemma, as he has already, at the very beginning of the film, proclaimed his love for a young woman whom, however, he has never yet spoken to.
Éric Rohmer
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Françoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault
A sharp, talk-driven moral comedy that turns a snowy Christmas encounter into a fascinating debate about faith, desire, and self-deception. It rewards patience with wit, intellectual tension, and one of Rohmer’s most elegant examinations of how people rationalize their choices.
My Night at Maud’s is one of the great examples of cinema that seems almost immaterial until you realize how much it has gotten under your skin. Rohmer builds the film out of conversation, but the talk is never merely talk: every exchange is a test of belief, vanity, attraction, and self-knowledge. The result is a movie that feels intimate, rigorous, and quietly suspenseful.
What makes it so enduring is the way it refuses to separate ideas from desire. Jean-Louis wants to think of himself as principled and rational, yet the film keeps exposing the gap between the life he imagines and the one he is actually living. Maud is not just a romantic possibility but a challenge to his entire moral posture, and Rohmer lets that tension unfold with remarkable patience and precision.
The snowy setting, the Christmas backdrop, and the confined interiors all sharpen the sense of inward pressure. This is a film about choice, but also about the stories people tell themselves to avoid choosing honestly. It is funny, exacting, and emotionally more complicated than it first appears.
Laura (4.5★) · 1230 likes
oh, the limitations of thinking we know ourselves & the startling realization that someone else can know us better
Ethan (5★) · 872 likes
“The thought of the future needn’t depress us, since we have none.” Éric Rohmer’s third of his six moral tales, My Night at Maud’s, concerns a Catholic man, Jean-Louis, who lives life practising a philosophy based on rationalisation and mathematical probability. At church, he falls in love with a beautiful young girl and vows she will be his wife. She is his ideal partner: blonde, pure, and devout. But after a brief encounter with an old schoolmate, Jean-Louis finds himself… more
Sadie (4.5★) · 810 likes
talking smart and trying to fuck, the rohmer way
Karsten (4★) · 802 likes
get it together man
lewisreed · 572 likes
I personally love it when people have religious trauma and are horny and depressed
Another Rohmer film about self-knowledge, romantic uncertainty, and the painful gap between ideals and lived reality.
A quintessential Rohmer moral tale that turns desire, observation, and self-justification into exquisite drama.
Shares the same cool, conversational examination of attraction, ego, and ethical posturing.
A breezy but incisive look at love, flirtation, and competing philosophies of romance.
Rohmer’s delicate study of indecision and emotional drift, with the same interest in talk as action.
A subtle, urban moral puzzle built from chance encounters, jealousy, and interpretation.
For viewers who love extended conversation as the engine of romantic and philosophical discovery.
A mature, dialogue-driven sequel that deepens the emotional and intellectual stakes of a brief encounter.
A devastating interior drama about despair, self-examination, and the limits of reason.
A landmark conversational film that turns ideas, memory, and personality into dramatic tension.
For its satirical treatment of bourgeois ritual, social performance, and hidden desire.
A great French social comedy about manners, masks, and the instability of civilized behavior.
faith and atheism, moral philosophy, romantic desire, self-deception, Catholic guilt, courtship and marriage, intellectual conversation, chance and coincidence
French New Wave, philosophical drama, talky romance, Catholic guilt, winter setting, moral ambiguity, intellectual comedy, 1960s cinema, chamber piece