My Night at Maud’s

Presented in partnership with Green Apple Books to celebrate the first English-language publication of Éric Rohmer’s novel Élisabeth.

Legendary director Éric Rohmer has long been praised—and criticized!—for his wordy, literate films, in which conversation and flirtation are the main events. But Rohmer was a relatively late convert to film; his first love was literature, and the culmination of his early ambitions was the novel Élisabeth, written as the Allies were battling to retake Paris, and first published under a pseudonym in 1946, when Rohmer was 26 years old.

Available in English for the first time this July, Élisabeth is a remarkable literary portrait of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century as a young man: a beguiling, strangely timeless, and prematurely wise first draft of what we now recognize as a quintessentially Rohmeresque situation: a summer idyll whose placid surface roils with lust, resentment, wit, and even happiness. It was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.

To celebrate the publication of Élisabeth, join us for a screening of My Night at Maud’s, the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world, drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After spotting the delicate, blonde Françoise at Mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, his rigid ethical standards are challenged. A breakout hit in the United States, My Night at Maud’s was one of the most influential and talked-about films of the decade.

Tickets: $14 General Admission. Film + Book: $32. The book will also be available for purchase at the theater for $19 plus tax.