My Night With Maud

Chance and fate, and the present and the past, are the themes of the late Eric Rohmer's black-and-white classic. It is perhaps the world's first "relationship comedy" (a very different thing from a romcom) and originally released in 1969, though as with many of Rohmer's films, the movie now looks and sounds a little antique. This film has always bemused a sizable proportion of its audience with its alleged talkiness and literariness. Yet this is precisely its charm. The story concerns a sanctimonious Catholic thirtysomething (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who finds himself having to stay the night with beautiful divorcee Maud (Françoise Fabian); she insists the snow means it's unsafe to drive home. The earnest style of 60s Catholicism, wrestling with the demands of the flesh and the secular world, looks a little quaint now; yet the film's modernity, romance and sexiness make themselves subtly felt. That eponymous night with Maud is the kind of extended conversation that everyone has had, or will have. It is the almost invariable prelude to sex which almost never gets shown on film: Rohmer's genius was to show it almost in real time. A date movie with a touch of class.