The Man Who Loved Women: François Truffaut

Barely five minutes into François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women I joked on twitter that I could turn it into a horror film with a few well-placed orchestra stings. Hear me out. One of the first scenes has the titular character, Bertrand Morane, observe a woman with a perfect set of legs while shopping. He writes down her license plate number and tries to manipulate the police into giving him the car's owner and address. When the police refuse to do so, he deliberately crashes his own car and blames the mystery woman. Even then the insurance people won't tell him the woman's identity. When he is denied again, I could almost hear the Bernard Herrmann in the background. But amazingly, these are scenes from what Truffaut clearly intended to be a light-hearted comedy. Morane spends the entire film collecting women. Oh, he claims that he loves women, but his drawer literally brimming with sad letters from his various conquests and one-night stands speaks differently. In 1977 Morane's hobby could be viewed as a harmless idiosyncrasy. But today, Morane would be swiftly diagnosed with a pathological disorder and condemned by legions of feminists. Do I doubt that such people exist? Not at all. But The Man Who Loved Women paints Morane as a melancholy hero who validates other women's existence with his "affection." Literally almost every woman he meets throws herself at him. Morane almost seems bored and resigned to his fate of sleeping with every woman in France.  He eventually writes an autobiography entitled "The Man Who Loved Women" where he seems to mourn a life of seducing hundreds of women. But I'm not buying it. Bertrand Morane is a sick, sick man. This film is a deluded fantasy. Shh! Do you hear that? It's the Bernard Herrmann, again...

5/10