My Night at Maud’s (Ma Nuit chez Maud) was released in 1969. The cast includes Jean-Louis Trintingnant (as Jean-Louis), Françoise Fabian (Maud), Marie-Christine Barrault (Françoise), and Antoine Vitez (Vidal). The film was written and directed by Eric Rohmer. It is the third of his six-film cycle entitled “Six Moral Tales” ("Six Contes Moraux").

The film takes place over several days during the week of Christmas. Jean-Louis is a 34-year-old engineer working for the Michelin company in Clermont, France. He is a devout Catholic. While attending church, he notices a pretty young woman in the congregation. Afterwards, he gets into his car, and starts following her, as she is riding her motorbike along the street. The next day, as he is driving home from work, he again sees her riding her motorbike. He thinks subconsciously that he wants to marry her.

Jean-Louis meets his friend Vidal, who teaches philosophy at the university. They find that they share a common interest in mathematics and in the philosophy of Pascal. They agree to meet the next evening.

They attend a midnight mass on the night before Christmas. The next night, they visit the home of Vidal’s friend, Maud. She is a beautiful woman who is recently divorced. Vidal tells her that they have attended the midnight mass. Maud says that she has never been baptized and that she does not believe in God. Vidal acknowledges that he is also an atheist, and they begin to discuss Pascal.

Jean-Louis says that he does not agree with Pascal’s interpretation of Christianity. He is also dissatisfied with Pascal’s low opinion of the sacrament of marriage. Jean-Louis argues that religion adds to love, and that love adds to religion. He admits that he has had love affairs with women whom he had thought of marrying, but he says that he has never slept with women for merely the sake of sexual fulfillment, and that he does not want to engage in promiscuous relationships.

Vidal tells Jean-Louis that, if this is the case, he must already be in love. Jean-Louis has not yet realized that he is in love with the young woman whom he had seen in church.

Later, Jean-Louis starts to leave Maud's apartment, but she tells him to stay, because driving home in the snow may be dangerous. Vidal decides to leave, while Jean-Louis stays with Maud. She tells him that religion leaves her cold. She says that she is neither for nor against religion; but she feels that Jean-Louis’s religious principles prevent him from being spontaneous and sincere. She is determined to show that he is not as adherent to his religious principles as he believes.

He says that each woman whom he has met in the past has presented him with a new moral problem, the problem of how to reconcile physical attraction with moral commitment, and that this has enabled him to overcome moral lethargy.

Maud admits to him that before she was divorced, she had a lover, and that her husband had a mistress. Her husband’s mistress had been very moral, sincere, and Catholic, like Jean-Louis; but Maud had broken up the affair, because Maud didn’t believe that her husband’s mistress would ever have decided to marry him. Maud’s lover, meanwhile, had been a doctor, but had died in a car crash.

Jean-Louis sees that Maud has only one bed in her apartment. He gets tired, and lays down to sleep beside her. They fall into each other’s arms as they are sleeping, and Maud starts to make love to Jean-Louis, but he pulls away from her, realizing that he cannot get involved in a casual affair. They say farewell amicably.

The next morning, Jean-Louis again encounters the young woman whom he had seen in church. He introduces himself, and they meet for lunch after they attend the church service the next day. Her name is Françoise. She is a 22-year-old student at the university. They promptly fall in love, and she later admits that she had a previous affair with a married man.

The next scene occurs five years later. when Jean-Louis and Françoise are vacationing at the beach. They are happily married, and have a five-year-old son. They happen to meet Maud at the beach, and Jean-Louis realizes that Françoise had been the former lover of Maud’s husband. This memory is painful for Françoise, because of her own religious principles. Jean-Louis tells her that Maud had been his last girlfriend before he met her, and in order to spare her feelings, does not reveal his discovery of her previous relationship with Maud’s husband. They smile, and are happy that they have put the past behind them. At the end of the film, they hold hands with their young son, as they run across the beach.

A recurring theme of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” is that in each film the characters struggle against their own inconsistency in order to follow their principles. They are faced with a situation which forces them to make a moral choice, and they must resist temptation in order to achieve moral integrity.

Jean-Louis is faced with the problem of how to reconcile his everyday actions with his moral principles. He knows that he is not a saint, but he recognizes the importance of being faithful to his sense of personal responsibility.

He has to confront his own inconsistency and moral uncertainty. He is interested in mathematics partly because he wants to know how to confront uncertainty. He feels that calculating mathematical probability may be a way to face uncertainty. The film examines the problem of certainty versus probability, and Rohmer provides an answer that is based on religious faith. In confronting moral uncertainty, we must have faith.

Jean-Louis finds himself in a situation in which he has to ask himself if it makes sense to be consistent with his principles, and if his principles are wrong. He sees that it makes sense to be consistent with his principles only if they are right. Jean-Louis learns from Maud that it is more important to be faithful to one’s personal sense of responsibility than simply to adhere to a rigid set of principles.