A Man and a Woman

A woman and a man, both widowed, meet at their children's boarding school. She works in film as a script supervisor, he is a racing driver. They travel back and forth between Deauville and Paris a few times. Getting close is easy; the rest is not, because she still cannot let go of her dead husband. The subject is not the beginning but whether a new relationship can stand in the same room as the old one. The film's hardest scene takes place in a hotel room, and what speaks there is not anything said but what is remembered. The form was invented out of a lack of money. Claude Lelouch shot parts in black and white because he could not afford colour stock, and the result now reads as style. The camera is handheld, some of the dialogue is improvised, and the car interiors were shot on real roads. Francis Lai's score became famous independently of the film; the repeated syllable in the wordless passage is remembered today ahead of the title. The film shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1966 and then won two Oscars, for foreign language film and original screenplay. Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant lead. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties French romance and films remembered through their music. Who it is not for: anyone after narrative density; this is almost entirely glances, music and driving.