Cinema as feeling

How Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme reminded me that cinema doesn’t need to be perfect - it just needs to reach you.

I’ve been too much in my head. I know I’m not the only one: in fact, I was talking about this the other day with a friend of mine. Often, when wanting to create, we get stuck. A writer’s block if you will. But this goes a bit further than that, especially when it hinders cultural intake. Books, art, movies, music. You get stuck in a rut and you start rewatching Friends for the 117th time. You listen to the same song over and over again. You cancel plans to go to the museum. You don’t pick up a book.

We wondered how to get out of it. I told her I thought it would happen organically, by chance, when you least expect it.

Shamefully, that’s been my case these past couple of weeks. I haven’t been working and so I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to pick back up this newsletter, to be consistent, to have something to show for myself. I’ve tried very hard to find the right film to talk about. I had all these kinds of plans. A full genre overview of French crime films spanning 15 years and 6 movies (it’s still in the works). A summer movie (but not a French one since my last post was about a French film). A car movie because I’ve been obsessed with Formula 1 since I saw F1 (a disappointingly decent yet absolutely exhilarating movie that 100% got me into a sport I used to roll my eyes at).

I couldn’t pick one. I couldn’t even get myself to watch a real film (god damn you, Drive to Survive).

Last night, I had enough. I scoured the apps for something to watch. At first I wanted to watch Il Sorpasso because it fit into one of those categories I had concocted (summer, not French), but the only version I found online was dubbed. Then I thought: maybe Bullitt. I’ve never seen it. Yet I couldn’t get myself to press play. I kept scouring. I actually gave up. I told myself I’d watch Il Sorpasso tomorrow (my dad is bound to have it on DVD somewhere) - and tonight, I’d just try to watch a film, a real film like I called it earlier, without pressure to write about it, just for the love of it, the curiosity for it, the need to snap out of a rut by seeing something beautiful and being inspired by it.

To me, a movie always calls for another. This one would be the gateway drug. Or so I thought.

Instead, a huge slap in the face. A discovery that came way too late for who I am as a person: a hopeful romantic.

Un homme et une femme
Claude Lelouch, 1966.

Clearly famous for a reason.

The film is set in December. It’s French. It’s everything I didn’t want to write about and yet I cannot help it. The gravitational pull is too strong.

The part that chance plays

Un homme et une femme was, in many ways, an accident, too.

By 1966, Claude Lelouch was 28 and nearly out of the industry. He’d made a handful of short films and a few features, but they had been commercial and critical failures. One of them, Le propre de l’homme, was booed so badly at Cannes in 1961 that a critic reportedly told him to “go sell shoes.”

Lelouch was not part of the Parisian Left Bank intellectuals like Godard, Truffaut, or Resnais. He was always a bit of an outsider - flashier, more intuitive, less interested in theory. He’d started out making cinéma vérité-style documentaries, but he hadn’t capitalized on it. His career was stalling.

Then, almost out of desperation, he started filming a short sequence on the Deauville racetrack: footage of race cars driving in the fog. It had no narrative yet, but it felt like something. He showed it to composer Francis Lai, who started writing music to it.

Slowly, images suggested a story. Lelouch began writing. He said the film came to him “like a flash”: a man, a woman, a shared loneliness.

He assembled a skeleton crew. He couldn’t afford lighting setups, so he relied almost entirely on natural light. Sometimes that meant shooting in black and white; other times, color. He said he let “the weather and emotions” dictate the palette. The switching between color and black-and-white was partly aesthetic, partly logistical, and totally unconventional.

He cast Jean-Louis Trintignant, who had recently gained recognition in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, and Anouk Aimée, who had worked with Fellini on La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 and brought a kind of magnetic melancholy to the screen. Neither actor had a full script. Lelouch gave them scene ideas and let much of the dialogue flow organically.

No one expected much from it. It was a small, personal film made with borrowed money and second chances.

But when it premiered at Cannes, audiences were visibly moved. The jury, led by Sophia Loren, awarded it the Palme d’Or: a shock win, beating out more established auteurs, like Jacques Rivette and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Later that year, it won two Oscars (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay) and became a box office sensation in France and abroad.

Suddenly, Lelouch had made one of the most recognizable French films in the world, and all without belonging to any formal movement. He was lumped in with the New Wave, but stood apart from it. Where Truffaut and Godard were cerebral or politically charged, Lelouch was unabashedly emotional.

He once said:

“I don’t make films to be understood. I make them to be felt.”

And that’s what Un homme et une femme is: cinema as feeling.

A visual, musical, silent romance

To further my point, the plot is deceptively simple: a man and a woman meet while dropping off their children at boarding school. She’s a script supervisor, widowed. He’s a race car driver (after all that Formula 1 content - my jaw dropped, it was serendipity), also widowed.

Anouk Aimée is devastating as Anne. She’s restrained and mysterious, her face somehow both opaque and magnetic. She wears her grief like a second skin.

Trintignant plays Jean-Louis with a quiet gentleness, unexpected for a man who drives cars at deadly speeds. He listens. He waits. He pays attention. But when it’s time to drive, he does. To race, and to race toward the woman he loves.

Their chemistry is not explosive. It’s tender, hesitant, adult. They don't fall into each other: they circle, then retreat, then return. Like two people terrified to admit that they want another chance.

Lelouch structures the film like a waltz. Themes recur. Emotions come up and disappear and arise again. Time slips: forward, backward, inward. The editing is stylish, but it also mirrors how we think, how we remember. Lelouch understands that grief doesn’t just affect how we love: it reshapes time itself. It slows it down. The past and present blur. Memory is not a flashback, but a lens.

Some scenes are in black and white. Others in color. Others still in sepia. And while people have debated why for decades, it’s not literal or logical. What if color represents memory, vivid but fragmented? What if the black and white mark the present, narrow and matter of fact? Or the present affected by past grief? The film doesn’t explain, but it doesn’t need to. What matters is that it feels right. Memory is rarely neutral, and Lelouch gives it tone.

And then there’s that music.

Francis Lai’s score is maybe the most iconic thing about the film. The "Dabadabada" vocal theme has been used and reused, often to the point of parody. But in context, it really, really works. I found myself so emotional hearing it. It carries the film. It repeats, like a memory you can’t shake. It gives it heartbeat and meaning, lyricism and depth.

Things that aren’t serious

The characters in fact rarely speak. Music often takes center stage on the audio track. So when they speak, it hits. At some point, Jean-Louis says:

“Dans la vie, quand une chose n’est pas sérieuse, on dit ‘C’est du cinéma.’ Pourquoi vous pensez qu’on ne prend pas le cinéma au sérieux ?”
“Je ne sais pas, moi… C’est parce qu’on y va que quand tout va bien.”
“Alors vous pensez qu’on devrait y aller quand tout va mal ?”
“Pourquoi pas ?”

Translation (it doesn’t really do it justice but for clarity):

“In life, when something isn’t serious, we say ‘It’s just the movies.’ Why don’t we take cinema seriously?”
“I don’t know... Maybe because we only go when things are going well.”
“So we should go when things are going badly?”
“Why not?”

That exchange ties right back to where I was when I pressed play. The rut, the repetition, the familiarity, and the desire to not be challenged. This wasn’t a movie I watched to write about. I watched it because I needed to feel something.

And isn’t that the most serious thing?

Timeless feelings

In some ways, this is the anti–romantic comedy. There’s no grand declaration, no final kiss, no certainty. But that’s what makes it so timeless.

It’s about trying again, not because you’ve forgotten the past, but because you carry it with you. Un Homme et une femme is romantic in the most grown-up way. It shows that making a bold move such as saying “I love you” by telegram in the middle of the night can prompt someone to drive hundreds of miles. It knows love doesn’t erase what came before: grief doesn’t just disappear, it softens. Real intimacy does takes time. And even after we say goodbye, we might still turn around.

Lelouch believed that cinema should be about emotion first, and you feel that here. Every shot, every cut, every note: it’s all designed to create mood, to capture something fleeting. That’s the kind of romance this film believes in: not declarations, not logic, not perfect timing. But gesture, instinct, leaps of faith.

You can see its influence in everything from Before Sunrise to In the Mood for Love to Past Lives.

And while I love these films too, nothing in there hit me more than the final moment of Un homme et une femme: a car racing back to a station, a man walking across the platform, a woman standing still. No words at all.

Sometimes you don’t need the perfect film. You just need the right one to find you at the right time. To pull you out of a rut. To remind you what it means to watch something and want to make something.

To remind you that a real film, one that truly gets to you, always calls for another.

In France, we say something is ‘que du cinéma’ to make it seem small. But what if cinema is the very place we can go when we don’t have answers? When life feels too uncertain, too much, too sad. That’s what Lelouch gave us. A film where feeling comes before logic. Where emotion is a structure.

Thanks for reading.

dabadabada, dabadabada…

Other truly romantic films that are anything but sappy

• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

• Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

• Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995)

• In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

• Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

• Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

“I guess I’ll see you in the movies.”