Blu-ray Review: A Man and a Woman

Blu-ray Release Date: March 31, 2026
Director: Claude Lelouch
Price: Blu-ray $27.99
Studio: Criterion Collection

My mom and dad were big fans of 1966’s A Man and a Woman by Claude Lelouch (Far from Vietnam), the final foreign language film they saw while living in Brooklyn before moving to Edison, New Jersey the following year (with four-year-old me in tow).

A major critical and commercial smash in its native France and around the world, the 1967 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film proved to be a romantic idyll that clicked with audiences back in a day of rising tensions (and the beginnings of Hollywood modernism). I remember my dad remarking that there were worse ways for a couple to spend an evening then watching the very photogenic Anouk Aimée (Model Shop) and Jean-Louis Trintignant  (Il Sorpasso) fall in love. And no less a sounding board then Pauline Kael declared it “the most efficacious make-out movie of the 1960s.”

This week, I finally checked it out for myself via a newly restored Blu-ray edition from Criterion Collection.

Aimée is Anne, a young widow in Paris who works as a film script supervisor; Trintignant, a widower named Jean-Louis, is a racecar driver. Both have young children, she a daughter and he a son, who attend a boarding school in Deauville, where the two meets while they are each visiting their kids. Clearly attracted to each other, Anne and Jean-Louis immediately begin to spend more time together and soon reveal the stories behind their spouses’ deaths. But it’s only after they spend a passionate afternoon with one another that buried emotions begin to complicate matters…

The story is a relatively simple one, but the mood and style of Un homme et une femme is consistently deep and rich. Set on a picture-perfect Deauville and Paris backdrop (along with a nice central piece at the Monte Carlo Rally!), the tale unfolds with a natural rhythm that’s only enhanced by the Aimée and Trintignant’s chemistry.

Though Lelouch himself insisted his film was not a product of the New Wave (“It’s a film that talks to the heart, it doesn’t talk to the intellect.”), A Man and a Woman’s handheld camerawork and multi-toned cinematography, naturalistic dialogue, and overall sexiness go far beyond the style of more traditional French movies from the previous decade. But it’s still a movie of its time and remains an exquisite romantic drama of its time in every sense of the genre, from its gentle falling-in-love montages to its elegantly loungey score by Francis Lai to a climactic sequence at a railway station where genuine love may well emerge the winner.

A nice one.