On the lists of Christmas classics that appear around this time of year, one film is always missing. My Night at Maud’s (1969) is the third work by the French director Éric Rohmer, and his first masterpiece. It tells the story of Jean-Louis, a 34-year-old engineer living alone in the hills above Clermont-Ferrand, during the vacant days of the winter break. Jean-Louis has worked abroad and loved various women, but now he has returned to France, started attending church, and begun to think about marriage

The film’s opening shots set the tone. Jean-Louis drives downs from his home in the hills, passing a wayside cross and glimpsing the dark spires of Clermont’s cathedral in the distance. Then comes a mesmerisingly slow mass in the Romanesque basilica of Notre-Dame du Port, where a beautiful blonde woman stands in the congregation, reciting her prayers alone. It’s Monday 21 December. The woman’s name is Françoise. Though the two worshippers have never met, Jean-Louis decides that Françoise will be his wife.

A couple of days later the engineer crosses paths with an old schoolfriend, Vidal. The friends dine together and, the following evening, attend midnight mass, but the beautiful blonde woman is nowhere in the congregation. Then, on Christmas Day, Vidal invites Jean-Louis to dinner at the flat of a divorced doctor named Maud (played with beguiling stillness by Françoise Fabian). She is an atheist, with dark hair, a seductive manner and a dramatic relationship history that contrasts with the innocent-seeming Françoise. When Vidal leaves, Maud pleads with Jean-Louis to stay the night, rather than drive home on the icy roads that have already killed one of her former lovers. But there is no guest bed in the flat, and Maud sleeps naked on even the coldest evenings.

My Night at Maud’s was one of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Each film features a conflicted young man who finds himself tested. Jean-Louis may appear earnest, but he’s never sanctimonious, and the bedroom scene with Maud is neither fantasy nor farce. Though the other characters tease the engineer for his rigid creed, the film respects his effort to navigate the modern world with Christian principles. At midnight mass, the priest even tells his congregation: ‘The happiness I wish you does not come from childhood memories or pious Christian habits, for it is a living joy, the joy of today.’ As a result, My Night at Maud’s is that rarest thing among Christmas films – one that is actually interested in religion.

Given his naturalistic technique and existentialist themes, Rohmer is often grouped with the other directors of the Nouvelle Vague. However, as a conservative Catholic, he was an outsider among the movement’s left-wing intellectuals and Soixante-Huitards like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. His films give little hint of these traditional views, yet they treat religion with a seriousness quite unlike the satiric tone popular in 1960s France. Of all his films, My Night at Maud’s is perhaps the most preoccupied by faith, but the story offers no simple spiritual lesson as it wrestles with the writing of Blaise Pascal and the concept of predestination.

Clermont-Ferrand was the birthplace of Pascal, and Jean-Louis spends his evenings reading the great mathematician. Pascal’s famous wager offers a probabilistic way to think about unlikely events: if the odds are small but the prize is big – infinite even – it must be worth the risk. For Pascal the wager applies to faith, but for Rohmer it’s no less relevant to love, and the question has special resonance during Christmas, when the infinite became finite, the divine became mortal. Sure enough, as Jean-Louis stays up late debating marriage with Maud, her daughter Marie interrupts the discussion to light the Christmas tree, standing for a few moments in the glitter and glow before returning to bed.

Over the course of the film, Rohmer’s plot forces his characters to confront the part that accident plays in their lives. Jean-Louis finally speaks with Françoise the morning after his night with Maud; another random encounter comes after Françoise misses a bus and he drives her home; when his car becomes stuck in the snow, she invites him to spend the night. That evening, after Jean-Louis tells Françoise ‘I like to try my luck, but I only succeed in a good cause’, she replies that luck and grace are not the same things. Certainly, the coincidences that structure the narrative in My Night at Maud’s do not suggest a benign creator, so much as Cupid making mischief during the holiday season.

Rohmer returned to this festive setting more than two decades later. In A Tale of Winter, he tells the story of a single mother dreaming that her child’s father will return in time for Christmas. In many ways, it resembles the earlier film: a lover trying to choose between contrasting suitors, wintry scenes in a provincial French city, and even a brief visit to church. But, borrowing from the Shakespeare play that inspired the title, A Tale of Winter ends with the miraculous reunion its story promised from the start.

My Night at Maud’s also ends with an improbable twist, yet in this case the happy ending is overturned. In the film’s spectacular penultimate scene, the two lovers stand in the hills above Clermont-Ferrand on New Year’s Eve. Snow is falling. The cathedral spires are rising in the distance. But Rohmer is too disciplined a director to provide the seasonal proposal his audience are expecting. The couple embrace, but they do not kiss, and when Jean-Louis confesses his love, Françoise responds with the secrets she has been hiding. Then comes one last chance encounter, one final romantic revelation, and even though the film concludes with the couple running into the sun, all illusions have been punctured and all innocence lost.

The holidays are a time when people’s working lives are paused and the quality of their relationships exposed. This explains why so many Christmas films are romances, with the festive season serving as matchmaker, throwing unlikely couples together alongside warming fires and too much mulled wine. Even the more grown-up examples of the genre promise a dusting of snow, a sense of cosy nostalgia, and some wonderful improbability waiting to happen.

My Night at Maud’s shares some of these features, with an unlikely couple and a will-they-won’t-they plot, as well as beautiful scenes set in wintry landscapes. Yet there is none of the hopeful innocence that characterises most seasonal romances, and the random meetings that propel the story forward are ironic rather than sentimental. The tone is more wistful, too: this is Christmas as experienced by the unclaimed and unloved, who spend the festive season wandering the streets, accepting chance invitations and dreaming about strangers glimpsed on the far side of church. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Rohmer’s early masterpiece rarely appears alongside It’s A Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34^th Street on the lists of seasonal favourites, but it deserves a place. My Night at Maud’s is intelligent but also sensuous, philosophical but also grounded in human relationships. The result is a festive film like no other: a love story of deep sincerity and quiet devotion. A Christmas classic for adults.