Mr. Hulots Holiday was a great comedy where the main character got into many different catastrophes one after another. He goes to the beach in a ratty old car and with a smile on his face expecting a great time, but he ends up in different awkward situations where he is always the one that messed up. Mr. Hulot was a very strange character with a gawky body shape and his weird clothes, he was also very polite to everyone he met and introduced himself to everyone. I thought this movie was quite hilarious because when Mr. Hulot screws something up he somehow always adds to that mess by doing something else. The movie is basically silent except for a few greetings and goodbyes. This is significant because it makes the comedy funnier, it just emphasizes the little jokes more than if everyone was talking the whole time. Tati made the character Hulot funny but he did not makes the character dwell on the joke for very long, he made him do the joke and get the laughs and then move on. This movie is very light, it does not have a deep meaning other than when you go on vacation you should enjoy yourself. Many of the characters had structured days, of when they eat and how to act on vacation, but Mr. Hulot had fun during his vacation. The last night at the beach Mr. Hulot was acting very silly and somehow he ended up in the fireworks hut and set off all the fireworks. Everyone was very upset because the fireworks woke them up, but Mr. Hulot found that this accident was beautiful and enjoyed them. That is the main message of this movie, that people should relax and enjoy their vacations and to not get upset over every small detail. Mr. Hulot definitly helped some people on vacation to enjoy themselves while he just bothered others. This was a great movie with its simplistic humor and upbeat music, I really enjoyed it.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Ma Nuit chez Maud
My Night At Mauds
Eric Rohmer
My thoughts on the Film
This movie was very interesting, the whole movie revolved around the main character who was a catholic engineer. The story began as he went to church where he keeps looking at this blonde girl with lust. He tried to follow her after church to talk but lost her in the crowd. He later meets an old friend Vidal, who is now a philosophy professor and they get a drink together. They talk about many different philosophies but mostly about Pascal’s theories. Vidal is very happy to have seen his old friend again and invites him to go to his lover Maud’s place after the midnight mass service that the main character wanted to go to. Vidal wants the main character to go with him to Maud’s place because he does not want to sleep with her and feels like they might become friends. Maud has the two of them over for diner and while they are eating the main character confesses he is a practicing catholic and Maud suddenly is interested in him. She duels with him over if God is real and the ways of Catholics which makes him prove to himself that god is real. Maud seems to dislike Catholics for some reason because she really argues with him over the idea of god. Pascal is brought into the picture again as they argue that he does not believe in God for certain reasons. The main character thinks Pascal is wrong about his theory of Jansenism morality, which is to serve God in the utmost way and have a deep religious passion. He believes that Pascal’s argument is wrong about Jansenism because he condemns good food. Then to change the subject Maud and Vidal want to know about the main characters love life. They believe that he already has a girlfriend and they wonder if he has made love to her. They joke about how he should not do that if he is a true Catholic but the main character confesses that he has had many lovers in the past but they were never just for one night. He believes that it is wrong if you sleep with someone and then leave them because its not a true relationship. Then Vidal and the main character notice its snowing outside and Vidal makes up an excuse to leave them alone. The main character is forced into staying her place because she is scared that he will get into a car accident and die on the way home. She tricks him by saying he can stay in the spare bedroom but there is no spare bedroom. He tries to get away by asking if she was to tired to talk but she keeps insisting she is not to tired and wants him to stay. Maud confides in him by talking about her ex-husband who cheated on him with a practicing Catholic that talked just like the main character does. She says that she went crazy knowing that her husband was in love with this girl but she was also having an affair with a man. Her lover died in a car accident when it was snowing and that was why she did not want him to drive home in the snow. Maud is laying in her bed naked now because she is about to go to sleep and the main character does not want to be seduced by her so he tried to at first sleep in a chair, but obviously being uncomfortable he lays in the bed next to her. In the middle of the night he looks cold and pulls the blanket over himself so Maud moved closer and he kissed her. When he realized what he did he pushes her away and she runs away naked. He is embarrassed by his own actions and decides to leave but she comes out clothed and asking why he is leaving and begs him to come to the mountains later that day with her and Vidal. She tells him that she doesn’t like when a man doesn’t know his own mind. The next morning he gets ready to go to the mountains and is waiting in a café for his friends when he sees the girl from the church, Francoise. He chases after he and asks her out she agrees to a date after Sunday’s mass. They are both happy and he leaves to go meet his friends again. On the mountain Vidal has a date so Maud and him are by themselves. He tenderly holds Maud but she tells him that it would never work in a very sly way. He departs from her that evening promising that he will call her before she leaves the city. On the way home he spots Francoise walking and gives her a ride home. His car gets stuck in the snow and Francoise lets him sleep in her spare bedroom. They were talking together about many different things that night and he tells her that he loves her. She seemed kind of uncomfortable when he said that but she said that she likes him. He tried to sleep but just smoked many cigarettes, when he was out of matches he went to her bedroom to see if she had any and she was still awake reading, which it looked like he admired that about her. The next morning they go to church together and after he confesses his love again and when she pulled away again he asks why she is doing that. She explains that she just got out of a love affair with a married man. She says that she loved this man but he didn’t want to see her anymore and that it was hard for her. He confesses then that the morning he came up to her he slept over a woman’s place and she said that the past is the past and not to talk about it anymore. Later that night the couple runs into Vidal who tells him that Maud has left and won’t come back for a while. He recognized Francoise but did not say how they knew each other. Five years later he is still together with Francoise and has a child together when they run into Maud at the beach. Maud says that she believed that they belonged together and wishes them well. She said that she remarried but that marriage did not work either. When the main character rejoins his family at the beach he realized that Francoise affair was with Maud’s husband and she again says that the past is the past. I believe that this was a very interesting film for arguments about God and if he was real or not. Also the relationship between Maud and the main character was very complex, it seemed that she helped him realize that he did not want to just go around with different girls anymore but to get married to a woman that shares the same values. Maud was very alluring and even though she made him break once by tempting him in her bed she did not break his beliefs because he knew he was doing wrong and did not make love to her. I really liked this movie because it was so simple the way that they shot it was just regular angles so it seemed like real life and the main character seemed pretty normal looking for love and questioning his religion.
Interesting Facts about the Movie
My night at Maud’s was the third film in Rohmer’s series of Six Moral Tales. In this case moral means moralist tradition which means that it is really associated with the greatest French authors classical period of writing. He refers to authors such as Pascal, Moliere, Racine, La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, and La Bruyere. These writers focused on psychological analysis of humans and their behaviors in social and not social forms. Rohmer was very interested in the way humans act towards one another and the way they think about many different things like the meaning of life, if there is a god, and falling in and out of love. The movies always seem to revolve around a man being in love with a woman in the beginning of the movie and then is seduced by other women but always goes back to the initial woman. Just like in this movie the main character is interested in Francoise and then is seduced by Maud but he returned to Francoise at the end (Singerman 314). The movie also revolves around the idea of Pascal’s theme of Jansenism and Jesuitism. The main character rereads the book Thoughts by Pascal and is interested in its idea of Jansenism which is the Catholic revolution where many people took a deeper step in their faith and become almost priest like. These people believe that sensual pleasure is a sin, and this means that they cannot even like good food. They must be completely involved in the studies of God and the practices of the Catholic church. The main character didn’t like this idea when he reread the book because he believed it was a sin not to take pleasure from food or things that make him happy (Singerman 316). One other interesting fact about the film is that the director decided to film it in black and white. He believed that this was appropriate for the main character and it fit in with the season of winter (Singerman 319). This movie had many interesting qualities, I feel like we watched it to see the revolution of thinking of the afterlife and sexuality at that time period. The movie explored many aspects of the time period and how people lived.
Works Cited
Singerman, Alan. French Cinema The Student's Book. English Edition. Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2006.
