Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is more than a little intrigued by Maud (Françoise Fabian) in the fourth of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales
MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD) (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
May 14-16, 1:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (Claire’s Knee, Love in the Afternoon), continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. One of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism, My Night at Maud’s is screening May 14-16 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues May 21-23 with Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and May 28-30 with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Merchant of the Four Seasons.
Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In The Face of Another, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is having a special screening May 17 at 3:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image and will be followed by a conversation between Nakadai and Terrence Rafferty; advance tickets are available now.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as a lonely, timid young man trapped in an existential nightmare with his mirror-image doppelgänger in Richard Ayoade’s brilliant sophomore feature, The Double, a dark, imaginative adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, itself a riff on the work of Nikolai Gogol. “It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning when Titular Concillor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin woke from a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes completely. He lay motionless in bed, however, for a couple of minutes more, like a man who is not yet quite sure whether he is awake or still asleep, and whether what is happening around him is real and actual or only the continuation of his disordered dreams,” Dostoyevsky’s tale begins, and Ayoade (Submarine) captures that confusion with respectful nods to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Orson Welles’s Kafka adaptation, The Trial, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Eisenberg (The Social Network, The Squid and the Whale) is first seen as James Simon, an intelligent but absurdly shy office drone who has trouble dealing with people; he spies on coworker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) through a telescope, fumbles his words whenever his boss (Wallace Shawn) comes around, remains utterly silent when his excellent work goes unnoticed, and doesn’t complain when he is regularly mistreated by a gruff waitress (Cathy Moriarty) at a local diner. Even the elevator and his mother (Phyllis Somerville) don’t like him. As his identity continues to shrink, he is blindsided by the arrival of Simon James (Eisenberg), who is everything James Simon isn’t: suave, sophisticated, sexy, and ambitious, willing to say or do whatever it takes to get ahead at the office — and into young women’s apartments. 
In his first feature-length film, Canadian DIY master Guy Maddin reaches into Icelandic sagas for the ultra-low-budget Tales from the Gimli Hospital. In many ways a kind of Scandinavian Frankenstein as if directed by Ingmar Bergman and George A. Romero, the seventy-two-minute mostly black-and-white Expressionist film is a story within a story (at times within another story) that an old woman, Amma (Margaret Anne MacLeod), is telling her grandchildren (Heather and David Neale) in a hospital room where their mother lies very ill. The dark, lurid fairy tale, set in “a Gimli we no longer know,” is about Einar the Lonely (assistant director Kyle McCulloch), a shy fish smoker who does not know how to relate to other people, particularly women. Felled by an epidemic, he is brought to Gimli Hospital in Manitoba, where other men battle this dread disease, which leaves stitchlike scars on their face and body. Einar is discouraged that the patient in the bed next to him, the portly Gunnar (Michael Gottli), is treated much nicer by the nurses than he is, but he is helpless to do anything about it. Gunnar is soon telling Einar the story of his true love, Snjófridur (Angela Heck), a tragic tale with a surprising twist that brings everything full circle. A unique visual stylist who regularly pays homage to the early days of cinema, Maddin, who directed and edited the picture (and wrote the script on Post-it Notes), purposely keeps things low-tech, including poor sound dubbing and bumpy, awkward cuts, incorporating such oddities as a puppet show anesthetic, Glima wrestling, fish-oil hair gel, an ominous soundtrack, and an over-the-top minstrel in blackface (McCulloch also); Maddin (My Winnipeg, Careful) also plays the weirdo surgeon who operates on Gunnar and Einar in rather strange fashion. In 2011, Maddin, who is part Icelandic, reimagined the film in the special Performa presentation Tales From the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, a reedited version with a live score by Icelandic musicians. The amateur nature of the original work led to its being rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival for ineptitude; it went on to become an instant cult classic, holding the midnight-movie slot at the Quad for nearly a year. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is screening May 9 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Movie Medicine,” held in conjunction with the exhibition “Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine”; the festival continues May 16 with John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday and May 23 with Michael Bastian introducing Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice.
