The Man Who Loved Women (1977 film)

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The Man Who Loved Women
Directed by François Truffaut
Starring Charles Denner
Brigitte Fossey
Release date(s) 27 April 1977
Running time 120 min
Language French

The Man Who Loved Women (French: L'Homme qui aimait les femmes) is a 1977 French comedy/drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Charles Denner, Brigitte Fossey and Nelly Borgeaud. In 1983, it was remade in Hollywood under the same title.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Montpellier: December 1976. At the funeral of Bertrand Morane, Genevieve (Fossey) observes the other mourners, all women once involved with him. The following is told in flashback.

Morane (Denner), a man in early middle-age, works in a laboratory testing the aerodynamics of aircraft, and pursues women in a compulsive, but casual manner without showing any signs of a capacity for commitment. He goes to extraordinary lengths to locate a woman he had seen, only to discover she was briefly visiting France and lives in Montreal. Bertrand becomes friendly with Hélène (Fontanel), who runs a lingerie shop, but she confesses to being attracted to younger men; she is forty-one, and does not become involved with men older than thirty. He has an affair with Delphine (Borgeaud), the wife of a doctor, who gains arousal from the threat of discovery, but she is imprisoned for the attempted murder of her husband. After a number of very casual encounters, Bertrand contracts Gonorrhea, discovered at a very early stage, but is unable to recollect the names of the six women he has slept with in the previous twelve days.

Eventually, he begins his autobiography only for his typist (Baye) to find the content too much to continue. Completed, it is submitted to the four leading publishers in Paris. A member of the editorial staff at one of them, Genevieve, stands up for the work against the objections of her (male) colleagues. Rejecting his title for the book, she suggests The Man Who Loved Women, which he finds ideal. Bertrand meets Véra (Caron), a significant old flame, while the book is at the proof stage, and insists on withdrawing the book from publication because he had neglected to mention her. Genevieve though persuades him to make Véra the subject of his second book; he needs to like himself she says. By now, Genevieve has fallen in love with him, in spite of recognising his personality flaws, but he has a traffic accident caused by rushing to meet her. Admitted to hospital, and forbidden to move, he attempts to observe nurses in the next room, but accidentally severs his drip and dies.

At the funeral, Genevieve speculates on the other women's relationship with Bertrand, she does not speak to them, and reflects that it is only herself who knows the ending.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Reception

The film has a very mixed reputation. For Ronald Bergan and Robyn Karney in the Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide, "the film obstinately refuses to cast light on its characters, making it no more than a superficial and sporadically entertaining exercise."[1] Geoff Andrew in the Time Out Film Guide describes the film as "[c]harmless...[it] irritates by its over-wrought sense of literary-style paradox, [and] by its insistence on eccentricity as its source of humour".[2] Melissa E. Biggs though, in French Films 1945-1993, describes it as "an extraordinary film ... made at just the right moment in time, when sexual obsession could still be ironic and celebrated and not held up to scorn by political correctness and feminist righteousness".[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ronald Bergan and Robyn Karney Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide, 1988 [1989], London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p361. In the United States this work is known as The Holt Foreign Film Guide.
  2. ^ John Pym (ed) Time Out Film Guide 2009, 2008, Time Out Guides, p667.
  3. ^ Melissa E. Biggs French Films 1945-1993, 1996, McFarland, p143.

[edit] External links

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