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)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 7, free with museum admission, 3:30
Series runs through December 29
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
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 December 7 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of its “See It Big! Great Cinematographers” series, which continues with such films as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, shot by Michael Ballhaus; Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo, photographed by John Alton; and Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, shot by Robbie Müller.
Jaws and Friday the 13th meet Lifeboat and Lord of the Flies in indie filmmaker Larry Fessenden’s latest thriller, Beneath. Made for Syfy’s Chiller TV channel, Beneath is the first feature film Fessenden (
Award-winning documentarian Marc Levin is being celebrated this week with a four-day “Masterclass” tribute at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem. The series begins December 5 with a fifteenth-anniversary screening of Levin’s second fiction feature, the genre-defining Slam. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the 1998 film stars Saul Williams as Ray Joshua, a young man arrested for selling weed in the appropriately named Dodge City in southeast D.C. Ray is faced with three options: plead not guilty and go to trial, which means long prison time if he loses; plead guilty and get locked up for eighteen months to two years; or cooperate with the police and walk free after naming names. Unable to make bail, Ray is incarcerated while trying to decide what he is going to do. While behind bars, he lets loose with some remarkable spoken-word rhymes that earns him respect and the attention of writing teacher Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn). Soon Ray’s artistry might be the only thing that can save him as he continues to fight an unfair system in an unjust world.
Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien pays tribute to master filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu’s centenary with Café Lumiere, a beautifully lyrical yet elegantly simple drama about a young woman making her way through life. Pop star Yo Hitoto stars as Yoko, a woman who spends much of her time riding trains and trolleys to visit bookstore owner Hajime (the always excellent Tadanobu Asano) and to find out more about Chinese composer Jiang Wenye. She also returns home to her stepmother (Kimiko Yo) and father (Nenji Kobayashi); the latter doesn’t react when he finds out that Yoko is pregnant and does not intend to marry her boyfriend. In fact, there are barely any emotional reactions at all, although there are plenty of trains taking the characters where they seemingly want to be. Cinematographer Lee Pingping shot Café Lumiere on location with natural sound and lighting; his camera often lingers statically on a scene as the characters walk in and out of the carefully composed frame and are heard off-screen, in long takes, furthering the illusion of reality — mimicking the truth Ozu strove for in his work. In essence, the film has no beginning, no middle, and no end; it is 104 dazzling minutes in the life of a fascinating woman and her friends and relatives. Café Lumiere is screening December 4 at 4:30 and December 6 at 7:30 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center festival “Ozu and His Afterlives,” which honors the 110th anniversary of the master filmmaker’s birth and the 50th anniversary of his death; he died on his birthday at the age of sixty in 1963. The series features Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon and Equinox Flower in addition to seven works that were either directly or indirectly inspired by Ozu and his unique style, including Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, and Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga.
When half-siblings Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) decide to track down their anonymous sperm-donor father, their two moms, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening), are justifiably concerned with how that might affect their close-knit family. And when the donor ends up being a motorcycle-riding, free-spirited hottie (Mark Ruffalo) who would like to become part of the kids’ lives, it doesn’t take long for some major dysfunction to set in. The third feature-length narrative written or cowritten and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, following 1998’s High Art and 2002’s Laurel Canyon (she directed 2004’s Cavedweller but did not write it), The Kids Are All Right is another intimate drama that explores deeply personal relationships with grace and intelligence — along with a little lesbianism. Bening is strong as the man of the house, overly determined to control and protect her family; Moore is beguiling as the other mother, wanting to develop her own business as a landscape architect; and Wasikowka, who was so outstanding in the HBO series In Treatment, impresses again as the prodigal daughter preparing to go to college. Ruffalo, however, is too flat, and the film takes several missteps, including a final scene that is sadly predictable, detracting from an otherwise fresh and original story. The Kids Are All Right is screening at the Museum of the Moving Image on December 1 at 7:00 as part of the weekend series “Julianne Moore,” which pays tribute to the award-winning actress known for taking on challenging roles, showing six of her films, including the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, and Todd Haynes’s Safe and Far from Heaven.