December 30, 1986 | First, the bad news: Contrary to what you might have thought after seeing Claude Lelouch’s lushly romantic A Man and a Woman (1966), the lovers did not live happily ever after. Jean-Louis, the daredevil race-car driver, and Anne, the sad-eyed scriptgirl, didn’t stay together very long, mainly because Anne hadn’t yet recovered from the death of her husband.
Now, the good news: Lelouch, one of France’s most prolific filmmakers, has decided to give the leads of his most famous movie another chance.
In A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, the engagingly bittersweet sequel on view at the Greenway III, we see Jean-Louis has retired from competition and now organizes long-distance races such as the Paris-to-Dakar rally. And we see Anne has become a producer of major motion pictures. More important, Anne sees Jean-Louis, to discuss her plans to make a movie of their long-ago love affair.
Cue Francis Lai’s haunting music, and it’s time to fall in love all over again.
Better still, it’s time for audiences to fall in love again with Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who repeat their original Man and a Woman roles for the sequel.
Aimee has kept a relatively low profile in movies since A Man and a Woman. (During the 1970s, she took a seven-year sabbatical from film acting.) But Trintignant has worked virtually nonstop in French, Italian and, occasionally, American productions. He scored his first international success opposite Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956), and later starred in such notable films as Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maude’s, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Costa-Gavras’ Z.
More recently, he co-starred with Gene Hackman and Nick Nolte in Roger Spottiswood’s Under Fire. But he had to learn his dialogue phonetically — he speaks little English and often relies on a translator when interviewed by U.S. journalists, as was the case when I spoke with him over lunch last spring at the Cannes Film Festival.
Trintignant, who figures he has made “about 100 movies,” remembers the first Man and a Woman as “perhaps the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had making a film.” Even though it was a low-budget effort, filmed under less than comfortable working conditions, “we knew we were making an extraordinary film.”
So when Lelouch suggested picking up the story two decades later, Trintignant immediately agreed to reprise his role as Jean-Louis.
“I feel a great kinship with Lelouch,” Trintignant said at the 1986 Cannes. “His way of working is deeply original, more than any other filmmaker I know. Under his direction, an actor cannot be bad. With him, I feel like a car in the hands of an expert driver.”
Trintignant, who turned 56 earlier this month, is a pretty good driver himself. He says he’s never happier than when he’s behind the wheel of a racing car. (Indeed, it was his idea to make Jean-Louis a racer — originally, the character was going to be a doctor.) And he was glad to race again in Twenty Years Later.
Shooting for three weeks in the Sahara Desert on the Paris-Dakar route was “fantastic,” Trintignant said. “But what excited me the most,” he added, “was when Lelouch took us off the trails, and got us lost in some places where almost no one had ever been before.
“It was a real adventure. We went far out into the desert, and lived under unbelievable conditions. This was possible only because we were all old friends. We didn’t have drinking water, so we were drinking from wells and that made us sick. And we ate nothing but rice and beans. Your average crew wouldn’t have held out for 48 hours on that diet.”
Surprisingly, even though two decades had passed since he last played Jean-Louis, Trintignant didn’t find it at all difficult to get back into character.
“To begin with,” he said, “there was no characterization. That’s what I was 20 years ago, and this is what I am now, 20 years later. I’ve aged, but so has the character. And nothing else has changed. I never really acted, in the first film or the second film. I was myself.
“’Well, maybe I stretched a little bit on the optimistic side to play Jean-Louis. I’m not quite as optimistic. But the rest of the character is exactly where I’m at.”
Did he mind that, according to the sequel, the young lovers of Lelouch’s original romance did not live happily ever after? “No,” Trintignant said with a laugh, “that’s what I liked about it. If they had lived together happily ever after, there would have been no point in making a second movie.”
