Themes: Infidelity, Love Triangles, Playing the Field
Main Cast: Charles Denner, Brigitte Fossey, Nelly Borgeaud, Geneviève Fontanel, Nathalie Baye
Release Year: 1977
Country: FR
Run Time: 119 minutes
Plot
When he suddenly dies and is buried, the late Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), an aeronautical engineer from Montpelier, receives funeral visitation from hundreds of women. Little wonder: in life, Morane simply couldn't keep his mind off of women -- one glance at a well-turned ankle and he was lost. Astonishingly, women felt the same way about him. Though more than one paramour held it against Bertrand when his eyes wandered, he never considered his promiscuousness a shortcoming -- which led him into amorous relationships with such colorful characters as a married sociopath (with a taste for lovemaking in risky places), a shapely blonde babysitter, an introspective book editor, and dozens of others. Ironically, Morane's success with women hardly represented a gift, for a deep, abiding loneliness lingered within him, resulting from his utter inability to love one woman. Bertrand (who eventually decided to write and publish his autobiography, "The Man Who Loved Women," as a form of self-analysis), could never quite pinpoint the source of his lack of romantic faithfulness, until a fateful and utterly unexpected chance encounter with someone from his past. Read by many as a thinly disguised film à clef for writer/director François Truffaut, The Man Who Loved Women mixes sharp, witty comedy with scenes of gentle poignancy; Truffaut uses the tale to make some deep and tremendously profound comments about love, sex, fidelity, and the underlying differences between men and women. The picture was thinly remade in 1983 by Blake Edwards, with Burt Reynolds as the irresistible hero and Julie Andrews as his therapist. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Truffaut's obsession with women and love is central to his films, and here he looks with bemused irony on a womanizing protagonist who seems to be more than slightly autobiographical. Although a mild-mannered middle-aged writer, he has only to see a theater usher cross her legs before he reflexively makes his move. His most taxing dilemma arises when two equally attractive women pass in opposite directions: which one should he chase? Charles Denner, whose diffidence has usually confined him to supporting parts, is well-cast as the slightly melancholy roue, who is so laid back that it takes time to register that his egoless charm is racking up a startling number of conquests. Indeed, as he moves smoothly from one woman to the next, he rarely hears a discouraging word from his gorgeous quarry, among whom are Nathalie Baye, Brigitte Fossey, and Nelly Borgeaud. But despite Truffaut's characteristic lightness and subtlety, the film would be little more than a witty male fantasy, did it not gradually insinuate the underlying sense of emptiness left by the man's obsession. There's little attempt at explanation; when his doctor humorously chastises him for being an aging hound, his only excuse is that he cannot love one woman, because, like the director, he has suffered parental neglect. But in the film's wickedly ironic conclusion, Truffaut intimates that, in fact, character may be destiny. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
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 the hospital and forbidden to move, he sees nurses in his doorway and, attracted by their legs, 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.
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]
References
^ 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.
^ John Pym (ed) Time Out Film Guide 2009, 2008, Time Out Guides, p667.
^ Melissa E. Biggs French Films 1945-1993, 1996, McFarland, p143.
