Prime Rohmer

As part of its retrospective And God Created Jean-Louis Trintignant, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is showing a 35 mm print of Eric Rohmer’s marvelous character study My Night at Maud’s on March 29. One of Rohmer’s effortlessly charming and thought-provoking Moral Tales, this was the series’ biggest crossover hit in the United States, an art-house sensation and conversation piece when it opened here in March 1970. Trintignant plays a rational, mathematically minded, and piously Catholic engineer who finds himself torn between the virginal Françoise and the appealing, seductively intelligent Maud, after he ends up spending an evening with the latter. The film is a buffet of romantic and philosophical discourse, witty and entertaining throughout. Check out the wonderfully talky original trailer.