Review of A Man and a Woman (1966) by Ditte K — 27 Apr 2008

How much originality can there really be in any cinematic treatment of a romantic drama? Plenty, it seems, in Lelouchâ??s Un homme et une femme, which puts nearly every genre cliché into the blender and serves up an entirely novel, if occasionally uneven, result; we might better describe it by turns as "contemplation" or "romp," but in both cases, â??existential.â?? The additive-reductionist choice of title might serve to tip us off to the fact that Lelouch is just as interested in the relationship of the camera to the viewer as he is in the relationship between the titular characters. The disjoint narrative structure and sudden visual shifts seem designed to break the â??fourth wallâ?? of the screen, to propound a new aesthetic: cinema as abstraction, not just documentation. The French New Wave could be seen to represent the arrival of thematic modernism from visual art into film, and moreover, the awakening of the formâ??s self-awareness: the camera embraces its own subjectivity, and asks the viewer to remain critical â?? the opposite of the old suspension of disbelief.

Luckily for us, this playful approach is so much fun in the watching that we neednâ??t be too concerned with all the theory; thereâ??s just enough coherence in the narrative layout, discontinuity notwithstanding, to follow without too much difficulty. Some of this operates on the level of sly humor and play on cliché. The very first dialogue is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood: a commentary on human relations? Or pure whimsy? The omnipresent rain, rather than serving as a trope for sadness or plot foreshadowing, sets the contemplative mood by which Jean-Louis and Anne begin to open up to each other. Jean-Louisâ?? racetrack test drive is accompanied not by the expected engine noise but by music, giving it a surreal, dreamlike quality.

But there are deeper ponderings here, too: one of the most striking sequences is the first serious dialogue between the characters, occurring, appropriately, in a car, in the dark, in the rain (this is, after all, a French film). We get intercuts to entirely separate scenes in lieu of conventional verbal answers to such questions as how Anne met her husband. The idea is endearing in its conception and humorous in its execution, particularly when Jean-Louis needs to ask for clarification along the way, but it also presents a winking inversion of cinematic convention: voiceovers with accompanying visuals are a customary means of delineating a flash-forward or back, but here it is the image alone that shifts the temporal frame, subsuming the text entirely. And perhaps most affecting of all is a later scene, where a voiceover describes the chagrin of Jean-Louisâ?? wife upon learning he has been in a serious racing accident, accompanied by wordless scenes of her visit to the hospital. As the narrator reveals her suicide, the visual cuts to a frenetic shot of racecars speeding by on the track. The sudden disjunction of text from image packs a visceral punch: the passage of the racecars feels violent in juxtaposition to the (only mentally visualized) suicide, as we havenâ??t yet had time to consciously abstract the scene from the narration. The viewerâ??s identification with Valerieâ??s loss is not visual but meta-visual.

Not all of the cinematographic devices are carried off quite so well; the constant switches between sepia and color seem designed to pull us out of the narrative and back into the frame of referential irony, but do so to overly jarring effect. Nonetheless, nearly every setting has its own particular visual integrity: the beach, the school, the racetrack, the car, and even the sex scene all have a specific vocabulary, from color palette to camera movement (or lack thereof). Some scenes present obvious symbolism, as when Jean-Louis and Anne speed down the open road while the opposing lane is clogged with traffic. Others are simply clever in visual execution, like the â??elevatorâ?? camera up the windows of the apartment building (as Jean-Louis, unseen, runs up the stairs) and back down. But the spirit of Un homme et une femme seems best captured in the final scene: as the camera twirls exuberantly around the embracing Jean-Louis and Anne, the background fades to white. The actors are left as if standing on an empty stage, reminding us itâ??s just a performance. Like Magritteâ??s famous comment on the nature of painting (â??ceci nâ??est pas une pipeâ??), Lelouchâ??s film is a comment on film itself.