What it’s about
Meeting at the boarding school where they each have a young child enrolled, lovely young widow Anne Gautier (Aimée) and lonely auto racer Jean-Louis Duroc (Trintignant), who's lost his own spouse to suicide, hit it off. When Anne catches a ride back to Paris with Jean-Louis, their friendship blossoms into a tender, passionate love affair conflicted by memories of their lost loved ones.
Why we love it
A highly popular date movie in the mid-sixties, Claude Lelouch's Oscar-winning “A Man and a Woman” may owe its innovative visual style to the French New Wave, but at its heart is a very simple love story, as the title implies. Flashing back and forward in time, switching from color stock to black-and-white, Lelouch tells the tale of these two lovers with stylistic panache and a dizzyingly romantic tone underscored by Francis Lai's lilting, memorable score. Love, as only the French know how to do it.