Review of A Man and a Woman (1966) by Deke P — 15 Sep 2014

A romantic story from the 1960s France starring the renowned actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and the talented actress Anouk Aimée (Lola, 1961)!

Winner of the OCIC Award and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival of 1966! That sounds convincing so far.

Wait... Nominated for 4 Academy Awards in 1967, out of which 2 were won, which are Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, and Best Foreign Language Film. Now that's a bad omen...

It's not that I want to speak bad about the Academy, but...

Well, in fact I do want to talk bad about the Academy.

It actually turns me on...

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So here we have an attractive recipe because its ingredients seem tasty enough, prepared at the right time, and with an enticing reputation thanks to Cannes. After all, few films open their initial credits proudly displaying their Palme d'Or.

This is a damn mixed bad which left me frustrated, and yet longing for more.

First, we have the visual style, which is the most troublesome aspect of it all. It constantly makes transitions between black-and-white and Eastmancolor. Why? No apparent reason, really. It is not nostalgia. It is not the characters feeling sad or depressed, and therefore repressing their sentiments towards one another. It wasn't something chronological, either. In fact, that would make even less sense. Nothing fits. Lelouch only wanted to say: "Hey! Look! I passed my Film University courses and I learned how to shoot images in both styles!" Good job there, boy.

Second, the cinematography, which is surely gorgeous and well balanced, feels like being given more importance than to the emotional development of the characters. This is supposed to be a drama that reunites two people in common circumstances (a widow and a widower) that slowly unravel their feelings and personalities between each other while they balance their past love life and their current existence. Both the past and the current existence are also given sporadic attention. Ergo, with no proper background, it becomes even more difficult to feel sympathy for the characters, and easier to feel betrayed at the resolution. This is written not with the intention of implying that a film that gives more importance to the style commits a sin when forgetting about its characters; on the contrary, if your plot does not justify the style - like it should have happened here - credibility begins to show a decreasing trend.

Thirdly, so maybe the fact that the characters are difficult to relate to because we have the cinematography and the gorgeous, catchy main score invading the story, maybe we can, then, focus on the story. Well, the problem is that the entire content of the sandwich is boring. Really, displaying scenes with no relevance for 50 minutes in the middle with some brief, but interesting intersections of plot management can deteriorate the experience, and it surely does here. This film would have worked way better if it actually had committed to its own responsibilities or to explore new potential areas, like the potentially successful character analysis/dissection it could have been, and that have increased in popularity today thanks to the work of Linklater and Kiarostami. Even the incredibly simplistic title is a sign about the predominant superficiality of it all.

But then, we have some weird intermissions that take us out of the Hollywood realm, of the predictable territory and of the corny garden where cinematic clichés flourish, and we find ourselves in the middle of moments that are either hypnotic, thought-provoking or simply captivating from an emotional point of view: key scenes like the couple watching a man alone with his dog walking alike, and then talking about how a person can be beautiful if the person chooses life above art; like a son speaking about his dream to become a fireman and asking for a Coca-Cola in Spanish; like the last act, which seems like an attempt by the film to ammend past mistakes and put additional layers to the story.

I see waited potential wherever I see, because there is love and intelligence at every corner, but poorly delivered... Maybe not poorly, but "uninspired" is the word, no matter how beautiful the last tracking shot is, no matter how strongly stories about couples dissecting themselves slowly resonate in my heart, no matter that it has two of my favorite French actors in my favorite decade of cinema, no matter how many times I will hum ("lalala") the main theme from now on during the entire week, like I am doing right now. I am being generous with it because it is not a conventional love story. It is pretty good at staying away from emotional manipulation stunts and clichés that push you away from a more realistic dream. There are strong strokes of poetry displayed throughout an uneven canvas of passion and self-discovery.

66/100.