My Night at Maud's

Jean-Louis, a Catholic engineer in his thirties, returns to Clermont-Ferrand after years abroad and decides he wants to marry. At Mass he notices a young blonde woman, Françoise, and fixes on her as his future wife, though he has never spoken to her. Around Christmas he runs into Vidal, an old friend and committed Marxist, who takes him to the home of Maud, a divorced atheist doctor raising a small daughter. Over dinner and drinks the three talk late into the night about religion, faith, love, morality and the writings of Blaise Pascal. Jean-Louis stays over at Maud's, and her unhidden interest in him, set against his own vows of fidelity toward a woman he barely knows, leaves him caught between desire and obligation.

Éric Rohmer wrote and directed the film, the third of the thirteen features he directed in chronological order, following La Collectionneuse and preceding Claire's Knee. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, Françoise Fabian plays Maud, Marie-Christine Barrault plays Françoise, and Antoine Vitez plays Vidal; the violinist Leonid Kogan appears as himself. Barbet Schroeder and Pierre Cottrell produced.

On IMDb the film's critics' rating stands at 8.2 out of 10 from 24 reviews, while on TMDB it holds 7.6 out of 10 from 369 votes, a narrower gap than is common for a film of its age.