''The Man Who Loved Women'' (french: L'Homme qui aimait les femmes) is a
1977
Events January
* January 8 – Three bombs explode in Moscow within 37 minutes, killing seven. The bombings are attributed to an Armenian separatist group.
* January 10 – Mount Nyiragongo erupts in eastern Zaire (now the Democratic R ...
French comedy
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...
/
drama film
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-g ...
directed by
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. After a career of more tha ...
and starring
Charles Denner,
Brigitte Fossey
Brigitte Florence Fossey (; born 15 June 1946) is a French actress.
Early years
The daughter of a schoolteacher, Fossey was five years old when she was cast by director René Clément to star in his film, ''Jeux interdits, Forbidden Games''. and
Nelly Borgeaud
Nelly Borgeaud (29 November 1931 – 14 July 2004) was a French film actress. She appeared in more than 40 films between 1955 and 2001. Borgeaud was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Creuse, France, at age 72. Her film career spanned ...
. In 1983, an American
remake of the same name starring
Burt Reynolds
Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. (February 11, 1936 – September 6, 2018) was an American actor, considered a sex symbol and icon of 1970s American popular culture.
Reynolds first rose to prominence when he starred in television series such as ' ...
and
Julie Andrews
Dame Julie Andrews (born Julia Elizabeth Wells; 1 October 1935) is an English actress, singer, and author. She has garnered numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over seven decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Fi ...
was produced by
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
. The film had a total of 955,262 admissions in France.
Plot
Montpellier
Montpellier (, , ; oc, Montpelhièr ) is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the Departments of ...
: 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
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...
. 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. He recollects his childhood and his relationship with his distant mother, remembering her legs in shots reminiscent of the frequent leg shots of women in the film. He pretends to have a child in need of baby sitting in order to lure a young woman to his apartment. When she discovers the doll he has put in his bed in place of a baby and asks him what this is, he replies, "It's me". After a number of very casual encounters, Bertrand contracts
gonorrhea
Gonorrhea, colloquially known as the clap, is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) caused by the bacterium '' Neisseria gonorrhoeae''. Infection may involve the genitals, mouth, or rectum. Infected men may experience pain or burning with ...
, 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 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 recognizing his personality flaws, but he is hit by a car while rushing to follow two women with attractive legs. Admitted to the hospital and forbidden to move, he sees nurses in his doorway and, attracted by their legs, accidentally severs his drip, falls out of his bed, 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.
Cast
*
Charles Denner - Bertrand Morane
*
Brigitte Fossey
Brigitte Florence Fossey (; born 15 June 1946) is a French actress.
Early years
The daughter of a schoolteacher, Fossey was five years old when she was cast by director René Clément to star in his film, ''Jeux interdits, Forbidden Games''. - Geneviève Bigey
*
Nelly Borgeaud
Nelly Borgeaud (29 November 1931 – 14 July 2004) was a French film actress. She appeared in more than 40 films between 1955 and 2001. Borgeaud was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Creuse, France, at age 72. Her film career spanned ...
- Delphine Grezel
*
Geneviève Fontanel
Geneviève Fontanel (27 June 1936 – 17 March 2018) was a French stage and film actress. She was nominated for the César Awards 1978 for Best Supporting Actress for her role in ''L'Homme qui aimait les femmes''.
She was a member of the Comé ...
- Hélène
*
Leslie Caron
Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (; born 1 July 1931) is a French-American actress and dancer. She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards. She is one ...
- Véra
*
Nathalie Baye
Nathalie Marie Andrée Baye (born 6 July 1948) is a French film, television and stage actress. She began her career in 1970 and has appeared in more than 80 films. A ten-time César Award nominee, her four wins were for '' Every Man for Himself' ...
- Martine Desdoits / "Aurore"
(uncredited French voice only)
*
Valérie Bonnier
Valérie Bonnier (born 13 October 1950 in Sainte-Colombe, Rhône) is a French actress, screenwriter, and novel writer who played Fabienne in the 1977 film The Man Who Loved Women
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting perso ...
- Fabienne
*
Jean Dasté
Jean Dasté, born Jean Georges Gustave Dasté, (18 September 1904 in Paris, France – 15 October 1994 in Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, Loire, France)Roger Leenhardt
Roger Leenhardt (23 July 1903 – 4 December 1985) was a French writer and filmmaker.
Early life
Born in a bourgeois Protestant family, this brilliant student of philosophy was very soon fascinated by cinema. Through a cousin, he started working ...
- The Publisher
*
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. After a career of more tha ...
- Man at Funeral (uncredited)
Production
Truffaut used his free time during the filming of ''
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' is a 1977 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. It tells the story ...
'' to write the script.
Reception
At the time of the film's release,
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...
described it as a "supremely humane, sophisticated comedy that is as much fun to watch for the variations Mr. Truffaut works on classic man-woman routines as for the routines themselves" and observed "I suppose there's always been a little of the late
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch (; January 29, 1892November 30, 1947) was a German-born American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as ...
in all Truffaut comedies, ...but there is more than I've ever seen before in ''The Man Who Loved Women.''"
Canby wrote: "Denner is very, very funny as Bertrand, a fellow who has the same single-minded purpose as the rat exterminator he played in ''
Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me
''A Gorgeous Girl Like Me'' (french: Une belle fille comme moi), also known as ''A Gorgeous Bird Like Me'', is a 1972 French film directed by François Truffaut, starring Bernadette Lafont. It is based on Henry Farrell's 1967 novel of the same ...
'', as well as the delicacy of touch of
Antoine Doinel
Antoine Doinel () is a fictional character created by François Truffaut and portrayed by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud in five films directed by Truffaut. Doinel is to a great extent an alter ego for Truffaut; they share many of the same childhood ex ...
on his best behavior" and called the sequence featuring
Leslie Caron
Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (; born 1 July 1931) is a French-American actress and dancer. She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards. She is one ...
the film's "most marvelous, most surprising"; her scene of four or five minutes is "so remarkably well played and written that an entire love affair, from the beginning to the middle and the end, is movingly evoked through what is really just
exposition
Exposition (also the French for exhibition) may refer to:
*Universal exposition or World's Fair
*Expository writing
**Exposition (narrative)
*Exposition (music)
*Trade fair
* ''Exposition'' (album), the debut album by the band Wax on Radio
*Exposi ...
."
For
Ronald Bergan
Ronald Bergan (né Ginsberg, 2 November 1937 – 23 July 2020) was a South African-born British writer and historian. He was contributor to ''The Guardian'' (from 1989) and lecturer on film and other subjects as well as the author (or co-author) ...
and
Robyn Karney
Robyn Karney (4 January 1940 – 7 December 2017) was a South African-born London-based film writer and critic.
Karney was born in Cape Town, but raised in Johannesburg. A stage manager for the theatre companies of Brian Brooke and Leonard Schach ...
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."
Geoff Andrew
Geoff Andrew (born 1954) is a British writer and lecturer on film, and Programmer-at-large at BFI South Bank. After gaining a First in Classics at King's College, Cambridge, he was for some years programmer at London's Electric Cinema in Notting ...
in the ''Time Out Film Guide'' describes the film as "
armless...
tirritates by its over-wrought sense of literary-style paradox,
ndby its insistence on eccentricity as its source of humour". 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".
The film was entered into the
27th Berlin International Film Festival.
In the United States, it was nominated for
Best Foreign Language Film
This is a list of categories of awards commonly awarded through organizations that bestow film awards, including those presented by various film, festivals, and people's awards.
Best Actor/Best Actress
*See Best Actor#Film awards, Best Actress#F ...
by the U.S.
National Board of Review
The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures is a non-profit organization of New York City area film enthusiasts. Its awards, which are announced in early December, are considered an early harbinger of the film awards season that culminat ...
.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Man Who Loved Women
1977 films
1977 romantic comedy films
1970s French-language films
Films directed by François Truffaut
Films partially in color
French sex comedy films
Films with screenplays by François Truffaut
United Artists films
1970s sex comedy films
1970s French films