The Man Who Loved Women

The Man Who Loved Women is very carefully titled. There have been many films about womanizers, Casanovas, Don Juans, skirt chasers, Lotharios, etc., but Francois Truffaut's 1977 film is a different sort of film. His protagonist, unlike many womanizers, who secretly hate women, is the opposite. He really loves women.

Charles Denner stars as Bertrand, a not especially good looking man who has a way with women. We get this idea from the opening scene, which is at his funeral, attended only by women. But, as the film moves steadily along, we realize he does not seduce women like someone collecting baseball cards, he loves them like a child loves candy, and could no more stop pursuing them than he could stop breathing.

Over the course of the film we will see his many romantic adventures, as he is putting them all down in a book. We start with him going to great lengths to find a woman whose only feature he spies is her legs. He jots down her license plate number, and then crashes his own car in order to report the number to his insurance company get her name. When he finds out she has gone back to Canada, he shrugs.

We also see him in a strange relationship with a psychotic married woman who likes public sex. She ends up falling in love with him and shooting her husband, going to prison. When she gets out she shows up at his place, while he has another woman in bed. The solution? A threesome.

But all is not roses and rainbows for Denner. He is in a state of arrested development--there is no chance of him marrying or settling down--and several women call him on it. But when his book is purchased, his new editor (Brigitte Fossey) understands this, and sees that he is not an egoist--he is the exact opposite. He doesn't come on to women, as with the situation with the car, he connives to meet women indirectly. He spies a woman putting up a sign offering babysitting services. He hires her, and when she sees that there is no child she asks, "Where is the baby?" "I am the baby," he tells her.

This film was remade as a forgettable American film starring Burt Reynolds, and so many American films about this kind of thing miss the point--The Man Who Loved Women is not some expression of a male fantasy. Some may aspire to a life like Bertrand's, but in the long run he is unfulfilled and dies reaching for a woman's legs.