The Man Who Loved Women (1977 film)

The Man Who Loved Women
Film poster
Directed by	François Truffaut
Produced by	Marcel Berbert
Written by	Michel Fermaud Suzanne Schiffman François Truffaut
Starring	Charles Denner Brigitte Fossey
Music by	Maurice Jaubert
Cinematography	Néstor Almendros
Edited by	Martine Barraqué-Curie
Production company	Les Films du Carrosse
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date	27 April 1977
Running time	120 minutes
Country	France
Language	French
Box office	$7.2 million

The Man Who Loved Women (French: L'Homme qui aimait les femmes) is a 1977 French comedy/drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Charles Denner, Brigitte Fossey and Nelly Borgeaud. In 1983, it was remade in Hollywood under the same title. The film had a total of 955,262 admissions in France.

Montpellier: December 1976. At the funeral of Bertrand Morane, Genevieve (Fossey) observes the other mourners, all women once involved with him. The following is told in flashback.

Morane (Denner), a man in early middle-age, works in a laboratory testing the aerodynamics of aircraft, and pursues women in a compulsive, but casual manner without showing any signs of a capacity for commitment. He goes to extraordinary lengths to locate a woman he had seen, only to discover she was briefly visiting France and lives in Montreal. Bertrand becomes friendly with Hélène (Fontanel), who runs a lingerie shop, but she confesses to being attracted to younger men; she is forty-one, and does not become involved with men older than thirty. He has an affair with Delphine (Borgeaud), the wife of a doctor, who gains arousal from the threat of discovery, but she is imprisoned for the attempted murder of her husband. He recollects his childhood and his relationship with his distant mother, remembering her legs in shots reminiscent of the frequent leg shots of women in the film. He pretends to have a child in need of baby sitting in order to lure a young woman to his apartment. When she discovers the doll he has put in his bed in place of a baby and asks him what this is, he replies, "It's me". After a number of very casual encounters, Bertrand contracts gonorrhea, discovered at a very early stage, but is unable to recollect the names of the six women he has slept with in the previous twelve days.

Eventually, he begins his autobiography only for his typist to find the content too much to continue. Completed, it is submitted to the four leading publishers in Paris. A member of the editorial staff at one of them, Genevieve, stands up for the work against the objections of her (male) colleagues. Rejecting his title for the book, she suggests The Man Who Loved Women, which he finds ideal. Bertrand meets Véra (Caron), a significant old flame, while the book is at the proof stage, and insists on withdrawing the book from publication because he had neglected to mention her. Genevieve though persuades him to make Véra the subject of his second book; he needs to like himself she says. By now, Genevieve has fallen in love with him, in spite of recognizing his personality flaws, but he is hit by a car while rushing to follow two women with attractive legs. Admitted to the hospital and forbidden to move, he sees nurses in his doorway and, attracted by their legs, accidentally severs his drip, falls out of his bed, and dies.