Ma nuit chez Maud
Oh wow, I love love love Rohmer to pieces. I couldn’t stop watching “Ma nuit chez Maud” last night even though I told myself to go to sleep soon. It wasn’t so bad – the film was over shortly after midnight, but I don’t think I could have stopped even if it was at 2 in the morning. It was just that addicting.
Looking at essays and comments on the film, I think I tend to disagree with what others wrote about it, after all, film is vague by definition. While it certainly is a film about “the lack of action” when there is something lingering there, I do not think that what they were saying was so ‘meaningless’. They didn’t just discuss love and fidelity and religion, it was their own shameful way of flirting with each other talking about why one would choose not to do so. Even Maud’s and the narrator’s last meeting, described at places as “talking about banalities”, is extremely important. What they are actually doing is wrapping up their relationship and say conclusive words about what that night actually meant to them.
Rohmer is wonderful at creating an almost artificial distance between you and those characters (very much unlike Truffaut’s characters whom you emphasize with a lot), yet at the same time the story flows beautifully. I thought their talking was utterly enjoyable, because it is fun to figure out their double meaning. There is one aspect I absolutely did not understand, but that is relatively unrelated to Maud. I don’t quite get what the narrator means when he says at the very end of the film that “his wife has discovered something about herself”. Oh well, I will never find out but I feel like I might have missed something crucial here.
I think Maud is quite a wonderful character. She plays a game which she realizes that she is going to lose because for some reason her female intuition tells her that there is a blonde in his life. Nevertheless it does not keep her up from playing with fire and giving the narrator quite a hard time. It is almost obvious how much better chemistry she has with him than aforementioned blonde, but ultimately that is exactly what the film is about.
Also, who thought Clermont-Ferrand could be so pretty? It’s nice to see a Nouvelle Vague movie outside of Paris, but really, “la campagne” looks awfully Parisian. Some of those streets the film was shot in could just as well have been in Paris, and the immense stylishness of Maud’s apartment even more so. I was especially impressed by that fluffy blanket. So seducing!
I am far from having seen all the black and white Nouvelle Vague films whose fresh and youthful style I love so much, and “Ma nuit chez Maud” makes me want to watch another one again.
La Boulangère de Monceau
I know perfectly that I have been at the Parc Monceau and the area, but now I am not sure anymore. The description of streets in Paris typically make me feel very reminiscent, and I often even have a clear memory of how these streets look like. It’s very Cees-Nooteboom-like, whom I love dearly for these descriptive promenades throughout cities. But for the entire area of Monceau, I have to pass. I don’t remember it at all.
Overall, I think I liked this film almost just as much as I did for “Ma nuit chez Maud”. The film is much shorter and does not allow for as much character development, and not that much really happens. It is striking how the dialogue is less well thought-out as it was for “Ma nuit chez Maud”, but the style is almost superior. In terms of direction, cinematography and writing, I think I prefer Rohmer even over Godard and Truffaut. When I had an idea for a movie awhile ago, I was struggling with the implementation largely because it needed many voice-overs. “La Boulangère de Monceau” is the perfect voice-over movie – oh wow. I wish I could do that.
In terms of the characters and the story, this film reminded of the other Rohmer short story I saw a long time ago, “Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick”. Unlike Godard and Truffaut whose quasi-non-serious, melancholic love stories regularly end in death, Rohmer’s are entirely different. First of all, his characters never declare their love. Unlike Antoine Doinel, they never say that they love but don’t. It’s much more the other way around, which makes it so much more interesting.
La Carrière de Suzanne
What makes this movie so annoying is that Guillaume is absolutely despicable. While Bertrand at least realizes his despicability, Guillaume is much worse than any Nouvelle Vague character I have ever seen. Most are fickle, they love quickly and are often drawn towards several girls, or they love somebody they shouldn’t. They hurt people because of their egocentrism, more because they are ignorant than that out of maliciousness. But Guillaume and Bertrand are downright mean, and certainly Suzanne actually knew about that. She liked those boys, but ultimately she also did not take them too seriously, but steadily approached her own happiness.
It is remarkable that Rohmer’s “beautiful girls” are most often of a very specific type, more often blonde than not, and the “less desirable girls” also have some similarities. Perhaps it is not very obvious to see the similarity between Maud, who is immensely strong and actually attractive, and the boulangère who really is fairly meek, but with Suzanne the connection can probably be made clearer. Specifically, these “less desirable girls” are not being pushed away because they don’t make great companion, it is because men are too engulfed in their own amour-propre (the French love this word, and I do too) and what they think they want to be or should be, that they are incapable to acknowledge their attraction to these women. I think this is a great premise, and I am glad that Rohmer decided to put this theme onto the screen a whole 6 times.