"What Is This Thing Called Love?

The Man Who Loved (?) Women"

Presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art

By Leon Levin

March 16, 2007

What first attracted me to this film was the surface charm and low-key humor of the characters, especially Bertrand Morane, played beautifully by Charles Denner.  I was also intrigued by the question of what enabled this small unsmiling unassuming man with a bad complexion to achieve conquests of a fantastic number of beautiful women, to succeed so often in accomplishing what seemed to him the absolutely most important thing in the world.  Perhaps it was the cigarette ravaged hoarse Charles Boyer voice.  Or the way, as one woman put it, he asked as if his life depended on it.  Or his skill in picking out the right women.  Or his flexibility –up to a point—to accommodate to the women’s desires, like Delphine who was turned on only by dangerous situations.  Or all of the above.  Whatever the reason, he was actually living out what adolescent boys can only dream about.  Ah yes, my inner adolescent boy said, he must be a happy man.

But that seems not to be so.  He doesn’t look happy.  His expression seems to be a combination of sadness, tension, and desperate determination.  After completing the film, the director Francois Truffaut contemplated changing the title to, “The Man Who Feared Women.”

The women in the film are often like his analysts, or like a Greek chorus.   They make observations and interpretations.  They note that he looks sad, that he is the lady-killer who doesn’t look like one, the wolf with the worried look who can’t love or be loved.  He is told he needs to think better of himself.   In the end his driven, heedless pursuit of women leads to his untimely death. 

At this point my interest shifts.  As is so often the case in genuine works of art, the comedy serves to both mask and reveal the complex human conflicts underneath the surface.  At the very outset of the film, the light joyful music contrasts with the fact that what is about to occur is a funeral.  So we are warned not to take the light-heartedness at face value.  The funeral attended only by women serves as a vehicle for black humor:  the dead man must be happy because he is looking up at what he loved to see.  I might add that maybe he is happy because the competition is eliminated.  No younger guys to take the lingerie lady away from him.  He has finally arrived in the island of only women, which so interested him, where he would reign unchallenged.  I recently read a quote from an actor who said that acting in the movies means letting the audience see that which the character does not want to be seen.  This it seems to me is what Charles Denner does with his character, Bertrand Morane.  He lets us see the neediness, the anxiety, and the depression hiding in the wings.

I now want to tell you about the extraordinary life of the film’s creator, Francois Truffaut.  You will see that the man who loved, feared, and perhaps hated women is Truffaut himself.  I say this with a degree of confidence because Truffaut made no bones about it—his films are, in a very direct and open way, about himself.  This is a central part of his famous auteur theory of film which Truffaut proclaimed as a critic.  Summarizing that theory, DeBaeque and Toubiana, in a biography of Truffaut, state, “An auteur… is a director who allows his intimate self to be seen on the screen…recognizing the man who has revealed himself emotionally on the screen is the ultimate consequence of the auteur theory.” (p. 100) I am going to discuss this film as Truffaut’s cinematic self-portrait, done in his mid-forties, released in 1977.  He died in 1984 at the age of 52 of a brain tumor.

Francois Truffaut was a remarkable example of human resilience.  He was born out of wedlock, father unknown, in 1932 to Janine Montferrand, a teenager from a conservative Catholic family with some aristocratic roots.  He was an embarrassment and unwanted, and she immediately shipped him off to a wet nurse, and then another foster home.  She rarely visited him, and mostly pretended he didn’t exist.  Turning to our film, note the bitter cynical comment of Bertrand in the scene where he encounters a wedding party:  “They believe in Santa Claus.  In seven years she will run off, or he will find a younger girl.  They’ll sell the house and farm off the children.”

The seven years figure before the “farming off of the children” is a significant number.  When Francois was three, his Grandmother Genevieve found him to be sickly and malnourished.  Fearing he would die, she took him home to be raised by her and a grandfather who was a strict and emotionally distant man.  She provided him with a stable and caring home, and Francois seems to have been transformed into a happy and mischievous child.  Then, seven years after his rescue, when he was ten, grandmother died.  His world collapsed.  He was sent off to his mother, who had meanwhile married Roland Truffaut.   Strangely, it was Roland Truffaut, not his mother, who insisted they take him in.  Roland adopted him to give him a proper place in society.  Francois was not told he was adopted.  When he was 13, he went through some papers and figured it out.  There is a scene in the film in which the young Bertrand goes through some papers and learns of his mother’s affairs.  In his real life, Francois discovered Roland Truffaut was not his biological father and therefore he was the product of one of his mother’s affairs.

The problem with his new life was that he felt his mother did not want him and that she was cold and disapproving.  He felt unable to please her.  Like the mother in the film, she walked about scantily clad, and had many affairs, which she did not hide.  Bertrand, his movie alter ego, watches a prostitute on the street who morphs into his mother.  His first sexual experience is with a prostitute named Ginette, and next he engages in sexual play with a girl his age, also named Ginette.  By repetition, Truffaut signals he wants us to notice the name.  It sounds something like his mother’s name, Janine..  When Bertrand and the youthful Ginette start their sexual games, the baby cries but is ignored.  Perhaps this suggests Francois Truffaut’s life long feeling of abandonment by his primary maternal figures.  In another scene, Bertrand makes love to a deaf woman who gets her son punished at school in order to pursue the affair with Bertrand.  Bertrand feels this is cruel.  The deaf woman is a metaphor for Truffaut’s image of his mother as being emotionally deaf to him.  He considered using as an epigram to this film a quote from a book by the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: “It seemed as if Joey never could get through to his mother.”

Truffaut was known for his charm and his numerous affairs with outstandingly beautiful women, almost always with actresses in his films.  Those who knew him well felt that, like Bertrand, underneath his charming surface he was an anxious and often unhappy person.  Of course falling in love is a potent antidepressant, but it often is not very long lived.  Staying in love is another matter.  Truffaut did not stay in love long.  His alter ego Bertrand Morane’s fear of intimacy is suggested by his ironclad rule never to spend the night with a woman.  I think it’s revealing that he will go through hell and high water to make a conquest, but he seems strangely unwilling to exert himself to hold on to a lover.  Truffaut’s love affairs usually turned into friendships while he turned to someone new for excitement.

Truffaut and Bertrand share a high degree of vulnerability to rejection or disapproval.  A few years before he made “The Man Who Loved Women,” Truffaut went through a traumatic break-up with the great actress Catherine Deneuve, famous for her icy blond beauty as well as her superb acting skills.  He reacted with a full-blown clinical depression, requiring hospitalization and psychiatric treatment, which included medication.  Bertrand’s conversation with Vera, the returning old flame played by Leslie Caron, appears to allude to Truffaut’s relationship to Deneuve, in which it was never clear who was the primary mover to end it, and to the depression which followed the break-up.  When Bertrand sharply corrects Vera that the romance ended five not four years ago, he seems to be referring to the actual interval between his ending with Deneuve in 1971 and his working on the screenplay of this film in 1976.    

In the film, Bertrand is stimulated to creativity by a rejection.  He is surprised that the lingerie woman doesn’t desire him erotically as he had confidently expected; she only wants younger men. We can guess that he fears getting older and losing his attractiveness to women.   In response to the rejection, he writes his memoirs in the form of a novel.  Through writing the novel, he comforts himself by remembering all his conquests.  He fears he otherwise might forget them, that is, lose them.  As he is the author, he is in control, not the helpless victim.

 He tries to recall all his affairs, but he forgets the most important one, the one with Vera (Leslie Caron).   Perhaps that one is still too painful to bring back.  Bertrand makes every effort to avoid engaging with her but she won’t let him get away with it.  He resorts to his trick of finding something amusing, but she responds that it is not amusing, and his face shows she is right.  For me this scene had real pathos; Bera won’t let him cling to his usual cool façade.  The scene brought home to me like no other the real sadness of Bertrand’s inability to tolerate a prolonged love relationship. 

Bertrand is vulnerable to the disapproval of the typist who talks to him as if he is a naughty sexual boy of whom she wants no part.  It seems likely that Bertrand associates this disapproval with his mother who, he believes, would prefer a broken leg to him, and who doesn’t acknowledge that her son is stimulated by her walking about half naked.  In that way she denies his sexuality and labels it as impermissible.  He must sit in silence and not move.  He must not react.  Bertrand does react strongly to the disapproving typist, who represents the return of the disapproving mother.   He becomes depressed and develops a severe writing block.  The block ends only when he feels supported by the literary authorities from the past.  He feels he is given permission to write his story in his own way; there are no rules.  His creativity asserts its rights.

The film offers us a picture of the mother-child relationship which helps us to make sense of Bertrand’s obsessive need for seducing one woman after another and presumably for Truffaut’s need too.  Bertrand is pursued by an image, formed at his mother’s knees, of himself as an unloved and unlovable child.  He searches for a transformative love that will undo this image and establish himself as loved and loveable.  But no matter how many women he seduces, some of whom really love him, the image of the wounded, rejected, little boy lives on, fixed in his mind by early maternal experiences.  He cannot find in external reality what will undo inner reality.  He tries, tries again, but the inner reality of the unloved and unlovable child trumps external reality.  The little boy in him looks at women from the little boy’s physical perspective seeing only skirts and legs, the little boy’s view.  So we have a reasonably plausible story.  He needs to counter his low self-esteem engendered by his childhood relationship to his mother by repeated conquests of beautiful women.

Or maybe it goes back even farther.  When the prospective babysitter asks, “Where’s the baby?” he replies, perhaps a little ruefully, “I’m the baby.”  Sometimes the intensity of his need, as if his life depends on it, approaches the intensity of the baby’s imperative scream for care.  We hear that baby’s cries several times in the film.  There was a time in Truffaut’s life when his ability to attract a woman may literally have been a matter of life and death.  His condition at age three as described by his grandmother suggests he was suffering from the miasma that Dr. Rene Spitz observed in children in orphanages where they were fed and kept clean but had no emotional mothering.  These children often died for no apparent reason.  If they survived we could predict they would have difficulty having intimate attachments to mothering figures in later life.  They had been deprived of the early attachment experience needed to develop trust and security in relationships, so well described by Dr. Bell last week. The woman Francois conquered at age three was his grandmother Genevieve.  Way before Spitz’s discovery, Genevieve instinctively understood the danger of miasma and rescued the little boy Francois.  And because of his appeal and his need and the seducability of grandma Genevieve we have Francois Truffaut. 

But it didn’t happen easily or smoothly.  If you had known Truffaut as an adolescent you probably wouldn’t have guessed that you were knowing a future great man.  He was a rebellious acting out teenager, telling outrageous lies, engaging in petty thievery, expelled from several schools for truancy and other sins.  His father sent him to juvenile prison for running up debts, which the father had to pay.  In France in those days a father could commit his son to prison.  After leaving prison he joined the army twice, deserted twice, and was imprisoned twice.

But remarkably, something amazing was going on with his psychological development that ultimately led to his great achievements.  At 14, the embattled boy moved out of his home to live with a kindred rebellious soul, Robert Lachenay, who dwelled in an apartment more or less alone because his rich parents were seldom at home.  The two boys created a world all their own with self imposed strict rules.  They loved movies, and they obliged themselves to attend two or three movies every week.  They loved books too, and read at least three books a week.  Here we see obsessiveness put to good work.  Truffaut developed a wide-ranging knowledge of the world of the intellect, especially an encyclopedic knowledge of film.  It was the golden age of film clubs in France, and despite his age he founded a film club and rented films for screening.  In this way he ran up large debts for which his father sent him to juvenile prison camp.  At the same time he caught the eye of the eminent film critic, Andre Bazin, who perceived the boy’s talent and became his mentor, protector, and all round good father that Truffaut never had.  It was Bazin who got him out of prison by taking responsibility for him and helped him get started in writing film criticism.  We see here what seems to be a repetition of the rescue theme derived from Truffaut’s early childhood need for and experience of rescue.  Perhaps when he read his mother’s papers he fantasized that he had escaped being aborted.

As a critic, Truffaut was an infant terrible who launched savage attacks on the French cinema establishment, which is probably no surprise to you.  His first full-length film was “The Four Hundred Blows,” the story of his adolescence, which became an instant classic.  Truffaut was on his way to a great directorial career.

His attack on the film fathers reminds us of the previously noted fact that men are more or less absent from Bertrand’s world.  Truffaut himself had many male friends, although they were always secondary to the women.  So here he is different from Bertrand, whose life is without male friends.  Truffaut tells us another plausible story about the nature of Bertrand’s obsession.  Bertrand has a nightmare that he is a model in the window of the lingerie lady’s store.  He takes the place of the female model and he is now the ogled one instead of the ogler.  This nightmare suggests that he fears being a woman who would be attractive to men.  The dream also seems to foretell his death.  He is a lifeless model not a live person, and the scene somehow echoes what we saw at the beginning of the film in which he is in his coffin ogled by women.  Perhaps death is unconsciously equated with being a woman.  By avoiding men in his life and even at his funeral he forestalls any possibility of a homosexual interaction. There is another scene where this defensiveness is made pretty explicit.  He is in the airport and he sees a group of well-dressed men carrying brief cases.  He immediately imagines them as women with exciting skirts and legs and avoids the danger of attraction to men.  So this is another plausible story: Bernard must conquer one woman after another to affirm his masculinity.

So what is this thing called love?  Is this a love story?  My answer is…yes and no.  Yes, all lovers need to some extent to establish their sexual identities, masculine or feminine.  And falling in love is an opportunity, by finding the perfect love object, to undo the frustrations and disappointments of early life relationships.  But Bertrand’s obsessive pattern never seems to bring about any growth or expansiveness.  Last week we saw that Tsotsi becomes David and undergoes a profound personality change through his love of a baby.  That kind of emotional growth never happens to Bertrand.  He is the same at the end as at the beginning.  The pattern persists unto death.  Truffaut gives us an image that conveys Bertrand’s failure to change.  We watch him at work where his airplane, under the control of a woman who seems to love him, goes round and round in a downward spiral, never getting anywhere.  The same happens with the boat, which can only go up and down with the waves, never moving forward to a destination.  This inability to grow and change is the essence of what we mean by psychoneurosis.

How can we understand Bertrand’s desperate neediness at the end, leading to his death from the heedless pursuit of women?  He had a Christmas date with his editor who has rescued him from rejection by the male editors of the publishing firm and fought energetically in his interest..  She was both his lover and protector.  Significantly, her name is Genevieve, the same as the grandmother who first rescued Truffaut and than abandoned him through death.  The failure of the editor Genevieve to be there for Bertrand is treated by Truffaut as an unbearably traumatic rejection.

The cover of the March 12, 2007 issue of The New Yorker is titled “The Man Who Loved Women.”  It shows a well-dressed man lying on a couch, possibly meant to suggest a psychoanalytic couch, surrounded by innumerable drawings of women’s faces.   He has an open book on his lap, but he is not looking at it.  He is looking up with an expression suggesting an introspective reverie.  At his side there is a bottle of wine and a wine glass, affirming that he is French.  The faces all seem to look alike, but if the implication is that the women are alike, it is not true for this film.  The women in the film are a rich assortment of personalities, richly individual.  What they all share is a certain body type, way of walking, way of dressing.  He has no interest in the car renter that he has hunted down because, even though she is quite attractive, she wears slacks.  As to the character of the relationships, it is Bertrand Morane who is always the same.  He cannot allow prolonged intimacy to develop, and he has rules to keep that from happening, such as never allowing the woman to stay overnight.  He is trapped in his never-ending spiral.