The Man Who Loved Women
Directed by Francois Truffaut, Starring Charles DennerBertrand Morane (Charles Denner)
Charles Denner, 69, an actor best known in the United States for his starring role in “The Man Who Loved Women.” Denner was the hero of the original 1977 film directed by Francois Truffaut, with whom he worked frequently. The film was remade in 1983 with Blake Edwards directing and Burt Reynolds in the leading role.
The film is a reflective story about a man who loved so many women as he tries to deal with everything he had done while writing a book about the many relationships he has as well as his own faults as a man. All of which has the main narrative exploring the life of Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) whose obsession with women’s legs and sleeping with them has him reflecting on his failures to find stability in his life.
Francois Truffaut
Truffaut’s swiftly paced, light-hearted exercise concerns a man whose very existence is devoted to women – a man perhaps not unlike Truffaut himself. Denner is the amorous title male, a well-off researcher who is surely one of the most woman-crazy men ever to appear on film. He can’t keep his mind off women; a mere glance at one femme dressed in black silk stockings sends him on a long journey toward love. All the while that Denner chases skirts, he remains charming and innocent, never believing he is doing anything wrong or harmful. Unlike those men who abuse women, Denner adores them–all of them. THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN is filled with Truffaut’s ironic sense of humor, always charming, and never in any way offending. As in all of Truffaut’s romantic comedies, what appears as flippant and sugary is actually a cover for some very complex statements about the nature of love, Truffaut himself, and the cinema.
