20 December 2019

François Truffaut's L'Homme qui aimait les femmes | The Man Who Loved Women (1977)

Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) is in aeronautics and obviously quite comfortable as he has an apartment with a close view of the Tour Eiffel. He stars among a cast of women in this slightly strange but highly enjoyable film about a man in Montpellier who is horrified by dragueurs or tail-chasers, he just loves women, and in his early forties still can't get enough of them. And he goes out of the way to try to get them, such as – in the beginning, after a scene set in the present in which many of his past conquests throw a handful of dirt on his coffin – running into a post in a car park and claiming a woman did it just because he liked the look of her legs and wants her address.

It's not just the idea of women that explains his never-ending thirst, but more that no one woman can satisfy him. He's tried marriage, even got tangled up with Véra (Leslie Canon), but this is not enough for him. One of his readers at the publishing house he's sent his typescript 'The Man Who Loved Women' to is smitten and persuades the other readers and the publisher to release the book. And she's the one who comments on the troupe of women passing his grave: he dies not of a heart attack, or violent Véra getting revenge on him, but simply getting run down after chasing a girl across the street – and, very sick in hospital, reaching out for a nurse and falling from his bed. An interesting twist on Truffaut's many femmes fatales.

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