Over the Christmas break in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand, the film shows chance meetings and conversations between four single people, each knowing one of the other three.
The discussions and actions of the four continually refer to the thoughts of Blaise Pascal (who was born in Clermont-Ferrand) on mathematics, on ethics and on human existence.
In the cafe, he encounters his old school friend Vidal, now a university lecturer and a Marxist, who invites him to a concert with violinist Leonid Kogan that evening.
The three talk and drink until Maud suggests that falling snow has made the drive to Jean-Louis' mountain village unsafe, and he should stay.
She makes herself comfortable on the double bed in the living room and tells of her former marriage, which fell apart due to her and her husband's different temperaments.
After leaving Maud's home, Jean-Louis meets Françoise at the same place as before and offers to drive her to the student house where she lives.
During one of their next meetings, Françoise admits that although she loves Jean-Louis, she had a passionate affair with a married man until recently whom she can't forget.
[3] My Night at Maud's premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown in competition,[4] and was released in French cinemas on 4 June the same year.
[1] The conversations are directly inspired by an episode of the television series En profil dans le texte called l'Entretien sur Pascal (The interview on Pascal), which was made by Rohmer and included a similar debate between Brice Parain and Dominican Father Dominique Dubarle.
Guy Teisseire of L'Aurore wrote that "the best compliment we can pay Éric Rohmer is to have done with My Night at Maud's a talking film.
I mean the opposite of a talkative film where the text would be used to fill the gaps: that is to say, a work in which eloquent silences are felt as lack of understanding about both is constant".
The theater, or the conference would have better served the purpose of the authors, because such controversies have nothing photogenic, apart from the presence of the beautiful Françoise Fabian and that very good actor Jean-Louis Trintignant".
Jean de Baroncelli of Le Monde wrote that "it is a work that demands from the viewer a minimum of attention and complicity.
[9] Penelope Houston wrote that "this is a calm, gravely ironic, finely balanced film, an exceptionally graceful bit of screen architecture whose elegant proportioning is the more alluring because its symmetry doesn't instantly hit the eye".
If it isn't clear within Maud who actually is making the wager and whether or not they win or lose, that only enlarges the idea of "le pari" ("the bet") into the encompassing metaphor that Rohmer wants for the entire series".