Cheap A Man and a Woman (DVD) (Anouk Aimée, Jean-Louis Trintignant) (Claude Lelouch) Price

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Customer Reviews of A Man and a Woman

Beautiful audio & visual look at a developing relationship!!
First saw this movie when released many years ago. Saw it multiple times and came away refreshed each time. Original French language version is far superior to the English dubbed version. Have LP and CD in my personal collection. You may opt to add this to your collection as well. Not stale or overly predictable, just a wonderful look at two almost regular people who discover each other the same way Rodin sculpted...piece by wonderful piece. Real and romantic with lovely music that has been with me for well over twenty years. This film is a winner as it helps to reaffirm the value of love in our lives and the freedom we have to experience it when recognized.

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5 stars for the ORIGINAL FRENCH version
And this ain't it. But it's all we got for now, so heh.

"Un Homme et une Femme" holds up quite well some 32 years hence. Younger viewers may not realize that a lot of the montage devices and tricks that may seem 'dated' were actually popularized and/or invented herein by Claude Lelouch. I actually found myself rewinding to watch the color sections a couple of times, especially the mid-film sequence scored to Francis Lai's achingly sentimental and lovely "Stronger than Us" as Anouk Aimee (the world's most beautiful woman) and Jean-Louis Triginant stroll the Deauville shore and muse on art and life. The tinting and grain of those sections - the boat ride, Anouk remembering her dead husband (Pierre Barouh) as he sings "Samba Saravah" to her - set a trend I pine for again.

The story? Well, thin, even by today's lughead standards (widower and widow fall in love against some lovely French scenery shot in winter), but it's obvious Lelouch was going for something that was quite new, then: a marriage of film and music that was not a "musical" per se, but rather, the forerunner of MTV (well, MTV with a soul, let's say). Cut loosely but thankfully not on-the-beat to Lai's jazzy/lush mid-60s score, Lelouch suceeds darn well. The freeze-frame ending cued to the final electric piano note, and that moment when Anouk Aimee pauses for the longest time and says to Jean-Louis, "You never told me about your wife", are two of my favorite filmgoing moments.

"Un Homme et une Femme" is emblematic of a world-view which I, for one, wish would take hold of folks again and topple the psychotic-trash-nihilistic consciousness now dominating pop culture. It was thoughtful, romantic, inward and outward at once, loving of sentiment but not wallowing in sentimentality, sophisticated, in love with love and with being alive in the world... not afraid of seeming tender. If any of this strikes you as square or passe or naive, then, this ain't your movie.

Let's hope the DVD gets released in French. Daria could use some alternative programming to 'Sick,Sad World', as could some of the rest of us.

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Amour Toujours
I never would have visited France (especially the hilly Parisian town of Montmartre, where Aimee's Woman lives) or taken a second chance on love, on loving a man again, had I not viewed "Un Homme et Une Femme." I first rented the movie in my mid-20s and re-rented it (including the English-dubbed version on VHS, which I do not like) countless times before finally purchasing it.

Monsieur Lelouch's cinematic narrative technique is poignant in his artful use of black-and-white scenes to display the bare-naked truth of humanity and, especially, his use of vividly colorful scenes to capture haunting memories. How affecting are these sunlight-filled and music-laden memories, from the man's and the woman's quotidian moments with their now-dead loves-of-a-lifetime, as well as recollections of those spouses' demise to the couple's idyllic moments with their children in the resort town of Deauville. You might recall the "family's" day trip on "the boat" and the stroll along the shore. The film's contrasts are lovely, including: b&w vs. color; innocence (the pair's children) vs. experience (the pair themselves), etc. The most obvious counterpoint is male and female: Man vs. Woman; Boy vs. Girl {i.e., Antoine vs. Francoise). I also love the pair's stark reserve (think of the lack of emotion after they finish making love at the Normandy Hotel) vs. their effusive emotion (think about the uncontrolled happiness when Trintignant's Man drives many miles from the Montecarlo race, after unexpectedly winning and receiving a telegram from Aimee's Woman ending with, "I love you," to find his femme. When he does find her, with the help of the children's boarding-school teacher, she is playing with les enfants on the beach. He steps out of his winning racecar, not caring how dirty it is after driving north from the South of France, and flashes his headlights. How beautiful it is when all four of them begin smiling, laughing and spinning around in absolute wonder and happiness -- all to the dream-scat score from Francis Lai's vibrant imagination. When I am feeling happy, my mind turns to that "dubba-dubba-da" theme. Does yours, too?

The images, the language (ah-h-h, le francais!), the romance the music and the fashions, plus the many messages, both subtle and concrete, of the importance of truth and frankness in the existence of love, the wholeness of Beingness and the desire to live in the present (and love the one you're with) -- all of this makes "Un Homme et Une Femme" a film that I and many others will cherish forever.