General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Man Who Loved Women

The Man Who Loved Women (L'homme qui aimait les femmes) is a 1977 French comedy-drama directed by François Truffaut, starring Charles Denner as Bertrand Morane, a Montpellier engineer and compulsive womanizer who, after his death, is remembered through the memoir he wrote cataloguing his love affairs.¹^•² The film was written by Truffaut with Michel Fermaud and Suzanne Schiffman, produced by Marcel Berbert for Les Films du Carrosse, and photographed by Néstor Almendros.¹^•³ In 1983 the American director Blake Edwards remade it in English with Burt Reynolds and Julie Andrews.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	L'homme qui aimait les femmes; France, 1977, first theatrical release 27 April 1977²
Director and writers	François Truffaut; screenplay by Truffaut, Michel Fermaud, and Suzanne Schiffman¹
Lead performance	Charles Denner as Bertrand Morane, a 40-year-old engineer; supporting cast includes Brigitte Fossey, Nelly Borgeaud, Geneviève Fontanel, and Leslie Caron⁵
Key crew	Cinematography Néstor Almendros; editing Martine Barraqué; music Maurice Jaubert³
Recognition	Golden Bear nomination at the Berlin Film Festival; César nominations for Best Actor (Denner) and Best Supporting Actress (Borgeaud and Fontanel)³
Critical standing	82% Tomatometer from 11 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; 7.3/10 on IMDb from about 8,200 votes¹^•⁵
American remake	Blake Edwards, 1983, with Burt Reynolds, Julie Andrews, and Kim Basinger; 23% Tomatometer⁴

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens at the funeral of Bertrand Morane, attended entirely by women, the lovers of his lifetime.⁶ In flashback, Bertrand narrates his own life while typing an autobiographical novel, which carries the film's title.⁷ An engineer in Montpellier who tests the effects of turbulence on planes and ships, he spends his free time pursuing women, sometimes going to elaborate lengths, including purposefully wrecking his own car, for a rendezvous.⁸^•⁶ After an unexpected rejection he decides to write down his erotic reminiscences, and his editor, Geneviève Bigey (Brigitte Fossey), becomes his next amorous relationship.⁸^•¹

The film's title is the title of the memoir its hero writes, and Richard Brody of The New Yorker describes the picture as an ode to the art of writing as much as a comedy about the pleasure and pathos of sexual pursuit.⁸ The narrative ties past and present together through extensive voice-over and draws analogies between the hero's compulsion and his early relationship with his mother; the film scholar Anne Gillain, in her chapter on the film in Totally Truffaut (Oxford University Press, 2021), reads it as an account of the inner process that triggers fetishism, concentrated on two vectors, women's legs and books.⁹ Bertrand's fixation on women's legs is stated in his own opening line of the memoir, that women's legs are like compass points circling the globe.⁵

Production

Truffaut conceived the part for Charles Denner, whom he had directed in The Bride Wore Black (1968). In a 1977 interview for the French magazine Cinématographe he said the idea went back ten years to that collaboration, and in another statement he and his co-writers wrote the screenplay for Denner out of admiration for what he called the finest actor's voice he knew.³^•¹⁰ Truffaut wrote the first draft of the script in his free time on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), on which he acted.⁵^•⁶ He chose to shoot on location in Montpellier rather than Paris, according to the Truffaut scholar Annette Insdorf, who was present at the shooting, partly because it required the cast and crew to live together as a group.³ Some sources list a working title, Le Cavaleur (The Skirt Chaser), which is also the initial title of the memoir Bertrand writes in the film.³ At the time he wrote the script Truffaut also wrote a novelization, not published in France until 2004, about twenty years after his death.³

Reception

During its United States release, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film a "supremely humane, sophisticated comedy," arguing that in the way it appreciates women in their infinite variety it was more liberated than most liberated films, which reduce women to abstract concepts; Janet Maslin, also of the Times, wrote that it was so curiously contemporary it might be ahead of its time.³ Pauline Kael, reviewing in The New Yorker, was cool toward the film, complaining that Denner's performance lacked the intended charm and that the script lacked psychological plausibility.³^•¹¹ The film was targeted by the feminist movement at the time of its release; the critic Claire Clouot of Pariscope called it "an inventory of spare parts exhibiting broads like veal scallops," while the festival notes for its American screenings describe, beneath the lighthearted surface, a melancholic portrait of a complex man consumed by urges he cannot control.¹² Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader later called it one of the few late Truffauts to muster any weight and complexity.¹

The film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and received three César nominations, for Best Actor (Denner) and Best Supporting Actress (Nelly Borgeaud and Geneviève Fontanel).³^•¹²

The 1983 remake

Blake Edwards viewed the 1977 French production and was convinced it would make an excellent American comedy; he completed the screenplay with his son Geoffrey Edwards and the psychiatrist Milton Wexler in October 1982, and the film was released by Columbia Pictures on December 16, 1983.¹³^•⁴ Burt Reynolds plays David Fowler, a Los Angeles sculptor whose hunger for women renders him socially, artistically, and finally sexually impotent, driving him to the couch of the psychiatrist Marianna (Julie Andrews), who narrates the story after his death; Kim Basinger and Marilu Henner play Louise and Agnes.¹⁴^•⁴ Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman were considered for the lead before Reynolds, a close friend of Edwards and producer Tony Adams, became available.¹³

The remake fared poorly with critics. Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013 and winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, gave it two of four stars, writing that in the Truffaut original the man was seen as a victim suffering from an incurable disease, whereas the Reynolds version seems to be recommending the disease.¹⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes the 1983 film holds 23% from 13 reviews against 40% from more than 1,000 audience ratings, compared with 82% for the 1977 original.⁴^•¹

Place in Truffaut's work

The film belongs to a series of inward-looking works Truffaut made in the 1970s, alongside The Wild Child (1970) and Two English Girls (1971), and to the group of more intimate, autobiographical films of the late 1970s that also includes The Green Room and Love on the Run.¹⁶^•¹⁷ The flashback of Bertrand as a child with his mother refers to Truffaut's own childhood, and the film's detailed depiction of writing and book publishing extends a motif running back to Jules and Jim (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966).³ Time magazine's 1984 obituary of Truffaut grouped Bertrand, "the scientist afflicted with a sort of Peter Pan satyriasis," with the director's other sympathetic portraits of doomed passion.¹⁸ The film was restored by the laboratory Hiventy with the support of the CNC for a re-release by Carlotta Films.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026