A Man and a Woman (1966) on Netflix
Anne Gauthier, a widow, and Jean-Louis, a widower who drives race cars, each raise a child alone. They meet at their children's boarding school when she misses the last train to Paris.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.5/1013,867 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
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Plot summary
A film script supervisor in Paris, Anne Gauthier raises her daughter Françoise on her own after her husband, a stuntman, died in an accident on a movie set she saw happen. Françoise boards at a school in Deauville, so Anne travels between Paris and the coast. Jean-Louis is a race car driver bringing up his son Antoine, who attends the same school; his wife Valerie took her own life after he survived a crash in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. On a Sunday evening at the school, Anne misses the last train home, and Jean-Louis offers her a ride. The drive passes pleasantly, and before he leaves her he suggests they travel up together the next weekend. She hands him her phone number.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Man and a Woman (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jean-Louis Trintignant asked Claude Lelouch who his ideal woman would be, and Lelouch named Anouk Aimée, who had starred in Fellini's La Dolce Vita and 8½. Trintignant, a close friend of Aimée's, told Lelouch to call her, and she accepted the part without reading the script.
SPOILER
The climactic railway station scene was not scripted, and Anouk Aimée did not know that Claude Lelouch had decided the two main characters would reunite at the end, so the look of surprise on her face is genuine. Lelouch also encouraged his actors to improvise, and several key scenes were improvised.- The film's "Aujourd'hui c'est toi" became the theme music for the BBC's Panorama current affairs programme. It is also used for Rede Globo's Jornal Hoje midday newscast and for YLE's Ajankohtainen kakkonen in Finland on TV2 from 1969 to 2015.
- A Man and a Woman was made quickly: one month of pre-production, three weeks of principal photography and three weeks of editing. Because of budget constraints, Claude Lelouch used an older handheld camera that was not soundproof, so blankets were often used to dampen the camera noise.
- The love scene was filmed at the Hotel Barrière Le Normandy in Deauville, which named a suite "A Man and a Woman" in memory of the film.
- Pierre Barouh, who plays the deceased husband in the film, also sings the songs on the soundtrack, and reappears in one sequence to sing "Samba Saravah", his own French-lyric version of the Brazilian bossa nova "Samba da Benção", written by Baden Powell with original lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes.
