DVD of the Week: “The Man Who Loved Women”

In 2011, I ’fessed up here to the review I most regret, but there’s a blanket judgment I regret even more—one I delivered in my very first article for the magazine, in 1999. There, reviewing a terrific biography of François Truffaut (which is still the gold standard in the field), I wrote negatively about Truffaut’s films after 1964: “Never again would the performances—or, for that matter, the images—in Truffaut’s film flow as naturally as they did in his first three films” and added, about his fourth, “The Soft Skin,” that it “may have been the last visceral, spontaneous film that Truffaut ever made.” Though I did add a kind word about “The Man Who Loved Women,” from 1977 (which I discuss in this clip), I didn’t yet see clearly the greatness of the best of Truffaut’s “later” work—which, strangely, is the work he made starting in his early thirties. I wrote here last year, on the occasion of what would have been Truffaut’s eightieth birthday, about the turn that his career took. It wasn’t a turn from the personal to the impersonal, or from the artistic to the commercial—it was a turn from the analogical to the symbolic, from the simple to the complex, from the near-amateur to the consummately craftsmanlike, and the films made clear the essential connection between these disparate qualities. And “The Man Who Loved Women,” one of Truffaut’s best films, is both a personal, nearly confessional work and an exquisitely conceived and executed philosophical and even sociopolitical vision. It may not be as “spontaneous” as some of his earlier films, but it’s far deeper and more intricate. And, among his “later” works, it’s not alone—though, unfortunately, some of the best, including “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me” and “The Woman Next Door,” are unavailable here on DVD. “The Soft Skin” is out of print but will be screening at BAM Cinématek on May 22.