Next week we’ll begin a Claude Lelouch retrospective at the Royal with a week-long engagement of his 1966 double Oscar and Palme d’Or winner A Man and a Woman, newly restored by Rialto Pictures. April 26 through April 30 we’ll also screen his films Les Miserables, And Now My Love, Rendezvous, Cat and Mouse, La Bonne Année, and Bolero (Les Uns et les Autres).
“A tender, visually stirring film of rejuvenating love between a widow and a widower: Trintignant and Aimée share a candid romance while balancing the demands of career and parenthood. It’s a touching, realistic look at a burgeoning adult romance, with each participant encumbered by a past tragedy, causing them to proceed delicately. Also famous for Francis Lai’s gorgeous, swooning score…Quite possibly one of the sweetest love stories ever captured on screen.” – Wilson Chapman, IndieWire
“How to resist a pairing as photogenic as Aimée and Trintignant? I couldn’t take my eyes off either of them.” – Anthony Quinn, The Independent
“The final scene should go down in history as one of the most romantic ever put to film.” – Far Out Magazine (U.K.)
“Beautiful… breathtaking.” – The New York Times
“Probably the most efficacious make-out movie of the swinging ’60s.” – Pauline Kael
“Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is a film as simple and complicated as its title implies. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay, it chronicles the tentative, tender romance between a widow and a widower, irresistibly drawn to one another despite the heavy weight of past tragedies. Newly restored in 4K, the film features two of the most iconic and attractive stars of French cinema photographed in a beautiful mix of color and black-and-white—the kind of thing the big screen was made for, never mind that the story is much more intimate than epic.
“Every Sunday, script supervisor Anne (Anouk Aimée) travels north from Paris to Deauville to visit her young daughter, Francoise, at boarding school; racecar driver Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) does the same to visit his young son, Antoine. One wintery Sunday, Anne misses the last train back to Paris and gets a ride home with Jean-Louis, and sparks fly each time they lock eyes across the car. Both say they are married and still wear their rings, but they eventually reveal to each other that their respective partners have passed away—though, for Anne in particular, the memory of her stuntman husband, Pierre (Pierre Barouh), feels very much alive.
“Upon arriving in Paris, Jean-Louis asks Anne if she would like to drive up to Deauville together the next weekend. What follows is a delicate dance between the two as they grow closer while still keeping a small, safe distance—enough room for the ghosts of their partners to hover between them. It’s an undeniably adult yet no less swoon-worthy depiction of two people falling in love, in which seemingly small gestures like Jean-Louis gripping the back of Anne’s chair during lunch—wanting to be closer to her but resisting the urge to put his arm around her—say more about their growing connection than all the flowery dialogue in the world ever could.
“There is a lot that makes A Man and a Woman one of the most timeless romantic dramas ever committed to celluloid, but it would be a lie to say that the film’s two lovely stars don’t top the list. Not only are they almost unbelievably nice to look at, but they also have a natural chemistry that makes it impossible not to be invested in their characters’ love story. The film thrives on them and their emotions; every time they glance at each other and smile, as though they seemingly can’t believe their good luck in finding one another, you can feel that warmth in your own heart.
“Aimée’s performance as Anne, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, is deeply poignant; her struggle to reconcile her burgeoning love for Jean-Louis with her ongoing love for Pierre, and the feeling that she is somehow betraying him by falling for another, is complex and moving. Meanwhile, Trintignant makes Jean-Louis a figure of irresistible magnetism who nonetheless has insecurities about his new romance that the film brings to amusing, affecting life via voiceover. After all, how does one win the affection of a woman when your competition is dead and cannot do anything more to hurt his chances? Perhaps if Pierre had lived and their relationship had time to sour, instead of being cut short in such an idealized state, it would have been easier, Jean-Louis muses.
“A Man and a Woman also utilizes flashbacks that are effective in telling us how our protagonists’ partners died as well as in showing us how powerful their love was in life, and why it’s so difficult for them to resign such love to the past and move on. The film is strongest when it relies on images like these and the aforementioned small glances and gestures between Anne and Jean-Louis—a shared moment of laughter on a boat with their children, a spinning embrace on a deserted Deauville beach, a surprise moment of eye contact across a busy train platform—yet the script, co-written by Lelouch with Pierre Uytterhoeven, is nonetheless intelligent when it chooses to speak out loud.
“Lelouch, who also served as the film’s cinematographer and supervised this new restoration, shot A Man and a Woman partially in color and partially in black-and-white simply because of budget constraints, yet the result fits the film’s story so well you’d assume it was a more purposeful stylistic choice. (If a film shot on a shoestring budget is capable of looking this good, why does the industry bother spending millions of dollars on films that look a million times worse? Though, to be fair, they don’t have stars like Aimée and Trintignant to photograph.) And just when you thought the film couldn’t possibly be any more stylish in that quintessentially twentieth-century French cinema way, Francis Lai’s enchanting musical score arrives on the scene and uplifts everything.
“A Man and a Woman is quite possibly the cinephile’s ultimate date night movie and most definitely a romance that will win you over.” ~ Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry