A Man and a Woman: Modern Lovers

When I first saw A Man and a Woman, with my parents, I recognized Anne (Anouk Aimée) and Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as the kinds of professionals that my mother and father might know. The actors lacked the Hollywood artifice (studio lighting, heavy makeup) I had come to expect at the movies. The dialogue seemed improvised (much of it was). It was a foreign film where one reads the eyes of the actors, not the subtitles.

Revisiting A Man and a Woman, I see how it adheres faithfully to the beats of a Hollywood love story yet nonetheless feels sui generis. A significant reason for that is the film’s style—its edgy editing, often suggesting flashback and reflection; its dynamic photography (Lelouch was his own cameraman); and, most radically, its mixing of different film stocks.

While this last part was out of necessity—Lelouch’s modest budget (around $775,000) did not allow him to shoot in color from beginning to end—he had experimented with the expressive possibilities of this technique on his previous features. Here the effect is singularly striking. A Man and a Woman’s exterior scenes are mostly in color, while other sequences are tinted in sepia or gray; still others are in black and white. Is the film effectively color-coded, as some suggest? Closer examination suggests that Lelouch’s use of color is in fact inconsistent—for example, not all of the sepia or gray scenes have the same mood, or are meant to evoke the past. The tonal variations challenge viewers to parse their meaning, attuning them more closely to the subtle changes in the film’s emotional atmosphere.

A Man and a Woman begins in fog and ends in clarity.

Fog blankets the Touques where the river meets the English Channel, dissipating as Anne, a sad-eyed beauty, recounts the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” to her daughter, Françoise. Cut to Jean-Louis, a playful guy, who orders his driver to take him to the golf course. As the camera pans right, it is revealed that his young son, Antoine, is the “chauffeur.”

The day is Sunday, the place is Deauville, the month is December, and the year is 1966. We have met the title characters, but they have not yet met each other. That will soon change, when Anne deposits Françoise at school and misses her train to Paris.

The boarding-school headmistress, aware that Anne is a widow and Jean-Louis a widower, suggests that Anne catch a ride home with Jean-Louis in his cherry-red 1965 Mustang convertible. Both parents are visibly self-conscious, but she is aloof and he outgoing. Obviously attracted to her, he asks whether she is married. She clears her throat without answering. Before long, she explains that she met her stuntman husband, Pierre (frequent Lelouch collaborator Pierre Barouh, who would marry Aimée shortly after making the film), on a movie where she was the script girl, a gendered term for continuity supervisor. She talks about Pierre with such animation that Jean-Louis assumes he is alive.

Shortly afterward, she asks whether he has a wife, then takes a hard look at Jean-Louis. She reckons by his flirty smile that he is single.

There is no “acting” in this Lelouch film, as elliptical and minimalist as one by Robert Bresson. Nor are there characters who speak with audible quotes around their dialogue. In his program notes for a 2024 Lelouch retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, Michaël Lellouche (no relation) wrote that the director “achieves this naturalness by letting the actors play like children, not giving them a script in advance, unsettling them, and observing them until he captures flashes of truth or laughter.” He doesn’t tell them how to walk, eat, or deliver a line. He trusts them to do it the way they’ve done it all their lives.

Once they’re back in Paris, Jean-Louis asks if he can drive Anne and Pierre to Deauville the next weekend. Only then does Jean-Louis learn of Pierre’s accidental death on a movie set. Rather than rely on Anne’s pained recounting, Lelouch wisely shows how it happened in a minute-long flashback. He is a “show, don’t tell” kind of filmmaker.

Some of the most memorable such moments in A Man and a Woman can be linked to other aspects of Lelouch’s résumé. Before embarking on the film, he had directed Scopitones, precursors of music videos, for Dionne Warwick and Sylvie Vartan. These film shorts played on a type of jukebox when the user dropped a coin into the slot. Lelouch financed his features with his earnings from Scopitones and advertising gigs. In A Man and a Woman, when Anne waxes poetic about her late spouse’s enthusiasm for samba, we see a music-video-like sequence of him serenading Anne. When Jean-Louis is on a joyride in his Mustang convertible as waves crash into his car on a Deauville beach, or driving his Ford GT40 roadster at Le Mans, Lelouch certainly makes speed seem both addictive and alluring. One might imagine that the leading man’s uncle, Maurice Trintignant, a French race-car driver who was on the 1965 Ford team at Le Mans, brokered a product-placement-style agreement between Lelouch and the automaker that benefited both parties.

Thus far in A Man and a Woman, we know about Anne’s loss and her work. Having agreed to accompany Jean-Louis to Deauville, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he does for a living. He explains that his job is to find the speed that will win the race without loss of life. He might be a thrill-seeker, but he can’t afford to be reckless. “At 141, you leave the road; at 139, you lose the race,” he says.

In the U.S. in 1966, it didn’t seem unusual to see a working woman on-screen. However, in France, it wasn’t until 1965 that the national legislature passed a law allowing married women to work and open a bank account without permission from their husbands. Anne represents this new French woman. Her job is an extension of her character, as Jean-Louis’s is of his. In her recovery from loss, continuity is key, while movement and speed are what enable him to escape his similar trauma, by cheating death himself. The film asks whether love is possible again after the death of a loved one.

In Deauville, Anne and Jean-Louis fetch the children for Sunday lunch. Françoise and Antoine are not noticeably jealous of their respective parent’s new friend. Jean-Louis wraps his arm around Anne’s chair, restraining himself from caressing her. On their way back to Paris, Anne asks about Jean-Louis’s wife. His account of Valérie (Valérie Lagrange) is all the more gutting for his lack of visible emotion: We learn, matter-of-factly, that Jean-Louis went into a coma after a near-fatal crash during the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Believing his death was imminent, Valérie committed suicide. As Anne takes all this in, Jean-Louis’s hand is near the gearshift, clutching hers.

Does she recognize that Jean-Louis, like the late Pierre, is an adrenaline junkie? Does he recognize that he might be attracted to Anne because she, unlike Valérie, is not afraid of risk-takers? As he races in the Monte Carlo Rally, Anne reads Moteurs, a racing periodical, and closely follows the sports news on television. Only a fraction of the racers complete the rally—among them Jean-Louis. Anne sends her congratulations by telegraph: “Bravo. I love you.” Even after he has driven the thousand-kilometer race, Anne’s message inspires him to drive a thousand more to see her. Accompanied by the metronomic rhythms of his windshield wipers and Francis Lai’s instrumental theme music, he makes Paris in record time. But she’s not home. It’s the weekend. She’s in Deauville. Only two hundred kilometers more. And voilà! He finds her on the beach with Françoise and Antoine.

The adults embrace. They return their children to school. They rent a room. They try, and fail, to consummate their love. Memories of Pierre intrude upon Anne’s attempt to be intimate with Jean-Louis. They are out of sync. This time, she does not ride back to Paris with Jean-Louis, who grimly drives her to the train.

Lelouch and screenwriting collaborator Pierre Uytterhoeven had planned that the lovers would not end the film happily, with an unsmiling Anne disembarking from the train alone. That was what Aimée, who had actually boarded a train from Deauville to Paris, expected. Instead, the director invited Trintignant to drive to Gare Saint-Lazare with him, to film the actress’s spontaneous reaction upon seeing Trintignant, when she expected only Lelouch. Would Anne walk by Jean-Louis without acknowledging him?

The ending that Lelouch orchestrated winds up exploding in joy. As Jean-Louis and Anne simultaneously speed to the capital, each recalls an episode from the previous night at the hotel restaurant: noting the waiter’s distress that they have not ordered starters with their steaks, Jean-Louis cheekily calls the waiter back, and asks for a hotel room. Both smile at the memory, indicating that, psychically, they are in sync again. On the platform at Gare Saint-Lazare, Jean-Louis waits for her train. When Anne emerges from the railcar, she is thrilled to see him. As Agnès Varda liked to say, “Chance is my best assistant.” One imagines that Lelouch would concur.

The camera circles Anne and Jean-Louis as they embrace, validating the possibility that they will be able to love again. Rewatching the film as an adult, I realize that the director prepared me for decades of French films that don’t resolve everything in the end.

To everyone’s surprise, including Lelouch’s, A Man and a Woman became a worldwide hit. It shared the 1966 Cannes Palme d’Or with Pietro Germi’s The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. It won Oscars for Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. The BAFTAs, the British film awards, honored Aimée as Best Actress, as did the Golden Globes (where the film also won in the foreign-language category). And significantly, in addition to the awards and money it reaped, A Man and a Woman—a favorite of Mike Nichols’s and Hal Ashby’s—enabled Lelouch to have a career. Since its release, he has produced and directed dozens of films in multiple genres. If you’re looking for more of his work, start with The Crook (1970), a favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s; the heist film Happy New Year (1973), a favorite of Stanley Kubrick’s; and the romantic biopic Edith and Marcel (1982), about Édith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan. Still, I would have to say that A Man and a Woman is the most profoundly satisfying entry in Lelouch’s filmography. Despite its unassuming title, the movie rewards the viewer with surprising specificity.