Birthday of A Man and a Woman
On May 10, 1966, Claude Lelouch's film "Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman)" premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival.
The film, one might say, was born out of nothing. In 1964, Claude Lelouch directed the film "Une fille et des fusils (The Decadent Influence)", which brought him the Best Director Award of the International Film Festival in Mar del Plata (Argentina). Wanting to build on the success, Lelouch made the film "Les grands moments", but not a single distribution company wanted to distribute this picture. A frustrated Lelouch destroyed the film's negatives and then drove all night from Paris to Deauville, a town on the coast in Normandy, where he fell asleep on the beach in the car. In the morning, he saw a couple on the beach that caught his attention. He began to invent the history of this couple. Thus was born the idea of the film "A Man and a Woman".
Lelouch's disappointment was quite understandable: he invested almost all the funds available to him in the creation of the film "Les grands moments". To create a new film after this failure, he raised money with great difficulty. A total of $100,000 was raised. As a result, Man and Woman had to be filmed in very cramped conditions. Lelouch himself performed the functions of not only the director, but also the producer, and co-author of the script, and the operator, and editor. The film was shot in three weeks by a very small film crew, the permanent composition of which did not exceed 7 people. Anouk Aimée recalled:
«Jean-Louis and I not only did our own makeup and attended to our own wardrobe but we also helped with the lights. We had no sets. For a scene on the train from Deauville to Paris, Lelouch and I actually took the train to Paris and he filmed en route.»
She also noted that the film crew traveled from location to location throughout France in just two cars, and everyone worked on Saturdays and Sundays to cut costs. Financial problems caused part of the film to be shot in black and white rather than color film.
The jury of the aforementioned Cannes Film Festival, chaired by Sophia Loren, awarded Claude Lelouch's film "A Man and a Woman" the main prize - the Palme d'Or (together with Pietro Germi's Italian comedy "Signore & signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians)"). And this despite the fact that among the nominees was, in particular, Orson Welles' film "Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight)" with Jeanne Moreau and Marina Vlady.
At the beginning of the next year, 1967, the film "A Man and a Woman" received 5 nominations for the American Golden Globe Award and won two of them, including the most important - Best Foreign Language Film. At the same time, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association preferred Lelouch's film over the already mentioned film "Signore & signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians)", as well as over the Soviet film "Гамлет (Hamlet)" by Grigory Kozintsev and the Czechoslovak film "Lásky jedné plavovlásky (A Blonde in Love)" by Milos Forman. Claude Lelouch was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Director, but the award went to Fred Zinnemann for directing "A Man for All Seasons". But on the other hand, Anouk Aimée was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Actress.
Approximately the same situation had taken place. In the same 1967 year, Lelouch's film received 4 Oscar nominations and won two of them, including the most important - Best Foreign Language Film. Among the contenders for victory in this nomination were, in particular, the mentioned film by Milos Forman, as well as the film by Gillo Pontecorvo "La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers)". And Claude Lelouch himself, who received a nomination as Best Director, as well as in the case of the Golden Globe, lost the Oscar to Fred Zinnemann.
A year later, Claude Lelouch's "A Man and a Woman" received two nominations for the British BAFTA Awards. In the nomination for Best Film from Any Source, the British Film Academy gave preference to Fred Zinnemann's "A Man for All Seasons". In a team of relative "losers" Lelouch's film was accompanied by the films "Bonnie and Clyde" by Arthur Penn and "In the Heat of the Night" by Norman Jewison. And Anouk Aimée again won the award for Best Actress.
As for the reviews of professional film critics, the film by Claude Lelouch is an example in which the opinions of critics strongly differed from the opinions of the cinematic community and the audience. The eternal grouch and snide Bosley Crowther from The New York Times called the film just a successful combination of beautiful music and beautiful pictures. But at the same time, the main problem of the film is the banality of its plot. At the same time, Crowther noted that Lelouch
«has a rare skill at photographing clichés so that they sparkle and glow with poetry and at generating a sense of inspiration in behavior that is wholly trivial.»
In the review of the famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, the following phrase attracted my attention:
"the audience success of "A Man and a Woman" is clearly exaggerated - this picture did not get into the list of the two hundred highest-grossing in the history of French distribution“.
This phrase attracted attention because even today, after more than half a century, I clearly remember how my parents and their friends then, in 1968, when the film was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas, went to watch it several times. And then, sharing their impressions, they groaned and sighed: "Ah, Trintignant, ah, Anouk Aimée!" For me, then a fourth-grader, of course, more interesting were "Old Surehand" by Alfred Vohrer or "La grande vadrouille" by Gérard Oury, which came out around the same time. But I hummed the melody of Francis Lay from "A Man and a Woman", like most of my peers. In addition, the box office of the picture amounted to $ 14 million, which, for a moment, was 140 (!) times higher than the cost of its production. Do we know many films that combine such financial success with festival success?
In fact, the film "Un homme et une femme (A Man and A Woman)" in the Soviet Union attracted nearly 28 million moviegoers, almost 12% of the population. And this despite the fact that the film went under the certification "Children under 16 are not allowed." And in France itself, the film was watched by 4.2 million moviegoers, which amounted to approximately 9% of the population, including the elderly and babies. And in terms of the number of viewers, the film "Un homme et une femme (A Man and A Woman)" among the French films in the French film distribution in 1966 took the third place, yielding only to the already mentioned "La grande vadrouille" and the film "Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?)" by René Clement. So, it is not clear what exactly Sergey Kudryavtsev means by "exaggeration of spectator success". Therefore, the assessment of another Russian film critic, Evgeny Nefyodov, is probably more relevant to reality, who writes:
"Prestigious awards that fell on "Un homme et une femme (A Man and A Woman)", and, most importantly, an unconditional commercial triumph that awaited the film as in its native country (4.27 million viewers), and almost everywhere abroad, became the test that a non-talented creator did not pass ... "
Modern moviegoers rated the film by Claude Lelouch no less highly than the audience of the 60s. IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave the film a score of 8 to 10, and every fifth user rated "A Man and a Woman" with the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of the film "A Man and a Woman" according to FilmGourmand version was 9,738, thanks to which he took 59th place in the Golden Thousand. Among the films produced by world cinema in 1966, these figures for "A Man and a Woman" are the highest. On this basis, the picture of Claude Lelouch can be considered the best film of world cinema in 1966.
