the wager
by
Douglas Messerli
Ḗric
Rohmer (writer and director) Ma nuit
chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s) /
1969
I
suspect that most younger filmgoers who may now see Ḗric Rohmer’s 1969 film, My Night at Maud’s, saturated as they
are by films that feature spectacular effects and use dialogue mostly as a
bridge to scenes of action, might find this work far too static and “talky,”
even as some of the critics of the day perceived it. And, in fact, the film’s
unnamed “hero,” (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a believer to an extent in the status
quo is a rather boring person determined from outset of the film to marry a
like-minded Roman Catholic, like the beautiful young blonde he has spotted at
the local cathedral in the small provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. The movie
features two religious sermons. Moreover, throughout the film, the three major
characters mostly do talk: of religion, morality, Marxism, marriage, and more
specifically about the great French thinker, Blaise Pascal, even through scenes
in which the sexy Maud (Françoise Fabian) appears to be trying to seduce our
hero into her bed.
But that is, in fact, part of the film’s point. The hero is a thinking man very carefully trying to negotiate his way through life by making careful choices that will align him with his conversion to Catholicism, and, in that sense, his decisions are more an issue of intellect over spontaneity. He and even the friend he encounters by accident in a town bar, a Marxist philosophy professor, Vidal (Antoine Vitez) use words as a method to maneuver themselves through life, as opposed to the agnostic free-thinking Maud who has, perhaps less-successfully, made her way through her senses. In short, the trio, who come together briefly at Maud’s apartment, where her current lover Vidal has taken his friend, represent three slightly different methods of taking chances, or as Pascal described it, making “a wager” with how one might live life.
Rather than regurgitating Pascal’s
argument, I’ll quote a rather long passage from Constantine Santas’ elegantly elucidating
article on the film from Senses of Cinema:
The
character in the short story refers to the “arithmetic triangle” but the Vidal
of the movie bursts out in a passionate diatribe on Pascal’s famous wager, and
its relevance to modern times and its particular value for a Marxist like him.
He says that Pascal’s wager has a modern relevance, and, as a Marxist, he has
chosen to believe that history has meaning. Like Pascal, a modern Marxist has a
question before him. Pascal’s wager poses a question to those who seek belief
on rational grounds: Proposition A is that God does not exist, or at least you
don’t know that He exists. In that case, if you accept this proposition, you
lose if you are wrong. Proposition B posits that God exists, as does
immortality (or, in the Pascal lexicon, “infinity”). If you go with proposition
A, you lose, without hope of redemption. If you go with proposition B – that
God and immortality exist, then, even though you bet against greater odds, you
still have a chance to reach infinity, a mathematical result of differential
calculus. Just as a believer who sides with God and immortality by making
Pascal’s wager, so a Marxist can choose to interpret history (and politics) as
a progression of events with a meaningful goal. You can assume the chances are
50/50, but even if you bet 10 against 90, it would be better to bet that
history has meaning, for the gain would justify your supposition. Otherwise he
would have to consider history as a passing series of casual events without
meaning, which would defeat the purpose of his existence. Gorky and Lenin,
Vidal observes, made a bet on similar grounds: if their chances of succeeding
in their ideology were one to a thousand, it would be better to take that
chance than none at all. Thus, the Marxist, like the religious man, can also
make a similar choice, or place a “bet” on the notion that history has meaning."
The problem is that the hero of the film
refuses to bet, or simply take a chance. Yet it is also his salvation, permitting
him to claim that he has won a moral victory over his own previously immoral
choices, when, in his youth, he was evidently a womanizer.
By chance, as I suggested, he runs into
the girl of his dreams, who also, eventually, falls in love with him. But she
too has a hidden past, a failed affair with a married man. To convince her that
he does not care about her past, he admits to a fling with Maud, even though
nothing sexual occurred between the two.
When, five years later, after he has
married Françoise and has had a young boy, he accidentally runs into Maud, once
again, on a local beach where the apparently happy family are celebrating. It
is now quite clear that the central figure of the film has made his wager by
choosing the safety of a conventional life, while giving up the possibility of
the more exciting and adventuresome would Maud represents. The women, he surprisingly
discovers, know one another, although Rohmer makes it clear there is a
mysterious coldness between them. After a brief discussion with Maud, during
which Françoise retreats with their son to beach, he returns to his family,
ready to explain that his “fling” with her was not truly sexual, until he
suddenly senses, as Françoise intensely fills her hands with sand and pours it
out again, that it is his wife who is hiding something. An perceptive viewer
can only realize that it was Françoise who broke up her marriage. For one of
the first times in his life, the film’s hero acts somewhat spontaneously,
hiding the innocence of his relationship with Maud, by suggesting it was simply
his last “fling,” As Santas brilliantly puts it: “He shifts the burden of
sinning to himself; and that little act of mercy redeems him.” Our utterly flawed
hero has determined to protect his “wager” by allowing history to die.
Anyone who can’t see the intense drama in
this basically “dialogic” work perhaps will never comprehend the wonders of direct
human communication, which all the cellphones and Facebook connections in the
world can never replace. Perhaps all young intellects should watch this film, if only as a document of the importance of
the human voice.
Los Angeles, December
12, 2017
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2017).
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