Banal but Beautiful

A Man and a Woman is a pictorially stunning, emotionally stumbling film about a woman mesmerized by the memory of her late husband, a jaunty movie stunt man who was killed while dancing through a battlefield set where a prop man's shell misfired. One Sunday at the Deauville school where their young children board, the widow (Anouk Aimee) meets a handsome widower (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a racing driver whose wife impulsively committed suicide, thinking that he had been killed in a crash at Le Mans.

Widow and widower fall in love, in a way, although flashback memories of the dead stunt man keep popping up when Anouk and Jean-Louis go to bed for the first time. Will she forget her old love for the sake of the new? Trying to answer the question, Director Claude Lelouch, 28, composes some stylish scenes and tosses in enough cinematic tricks borrowed from older New Wave directors--abrupt switches from black-and-white to color, for example--to have won this year's Cannes Festival Grand Prix. But his does-she-or-doesn't-she story, banal to begin with, sounds like nothing so much as an existentialist "Dear Abby" column in which sentiment has melted into sentimentality.

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