My Night at Maud's
To mark the release of Francine Laurendeau, celle qui aime (Somme toute, under the direction of Stéphane Lépine), we present some of the films that left a lasting impression on this influential voice in Quebec film criticism.
After a long stay abroad, a Catholic engineer returns home to Clermont-Ferrand. On Christmas Day, he meets Maud, a young woman recently divorced. But the engineer's heart is elsewhere.
Éric Rohmer
Born in France in 1920 as Maurice Schérer, Éric Rohmer developed a passion for literature at a very young age. After studying classical literature, earning a teaching degree, and aspiring to become a writer, he began hosting the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin in Paris, where he met Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. He wrote for the Revue du Cinéma, founded the Gazette du Cinéma, and later joined the newly established Cahiers du Cinéma, with the nascent French New Wave, where he served as editor-in-chief from 1957 to 1963. In the early 1950s, transitioned to filmmaking, directing several shorts before his first feature, The Sign of Leo, in 1959. His major success came in the 1970s with his Six Moral Tales series. In 1962, he also co-founded Les Films du Losange with Barbet Schroeder and Pierre Cottrell. From the 1960s to 2000, Rohmer created an extraordinary body of work, driven by an independent spirit that set him apart from the French New Wave, even as he remained a key figure of the movement he helped define.
Photo: Collections de la Cinémathèque québécoise
