[The] details of the story, if one can so dignify the skeleton over which Rohmer has stretched his movie [My Night at Maud's], are of less consequence than the remarkable manner in which these ordinarily pretentious, faintly foolish, incredibly verbal people compel our attention—the shifting of a glance or of a position in a chair becomes an event as important as, say, a murder or a cavalry charge in an ordinary movie.

How soberly involved everyone is! How comic is the care with which they examine themselves and each other about their motives and the effect their small statements and actions are having! (p. 307)

Is there, in fact, an American producer who [like Rohmer] understands that eroticism can be intellectual, may involve neither coupling nor stripping? Is there one who would risk a satire on the modern demi-intellectual's insistence on analyzing everything to death that you do...