“A Man and a Woman” Returns to Cannes — Quietly, and Forever
- Elena Saubanova
- 24 minutes ago
- 3 min read
This year, the Cannes Film Festival chose emotion over novelty. The official poster for 2025 features a frame from a film nearly sixty years old: two people running toward each other on a deserted beach, leaping into an embrace, suspended mid-air. Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), 1966. A film that became one of the most tender love stories in European cinema — and an unexpected commercial triumph.
It would be easy to label it “a romantic drama.” But in truth, it’s a film about silence, hesitation, tone. About glances that last a second too long. About love that arrives too late — and for that reason, right on time.
When Claude Lelouch began filming in 1965, no one had faith in the project. After a box office failure, he was nearly pushed out of the industry. He shot on whatever film stock he could find, with a skeletal crew and little money — the budget amounted to just over 400,000 old francs (roughly €80,000 today). He switched between black and white and color stock based on intuition, filmed in natural light, wrote dialogue on the fly. The result was cinema built on impulse — and it worked.
The plot is simple: she’s a film assistant, a widow. He’s a race car driver, also widowed. Their children attend the same boarding school. They meet by chance during weekend visits. They talk. They don’t. They talk again. No major events, except the ones happening inside each of them. Lelouch famously said: “I wanted to make a film where the dialogue was breath, and the pauses were music.” And in Un homme et une femme, it’s the silences that speak loudest.
This is where the chemistry between Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant becomes everything. They don’t play lovers. They play two people who no longer know if they’re allowed to fall in love. Her restraint speaks of past trauma. His quietness is a shield against hurting someone — or being hurt again. Together, they create a screen couple more powerful than any melodrama, simply because there is no performance — only presence.
But perhaps the real protagonist of the film is the music. The soundtrack, composed by Francis Lai, became a worldwide sensation. Its iconic theme — "Dabadabada" — entered pop culture almost instantly and never left. Nearly wordless, it captures everything: awkwardness, playfulness, longing. It doesn’t accompany the story. It becomes the story’s voice.
No one expected success. Yet the film went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1966, followed by two Oscars (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay), a Golden Globe, and a dozen national and international awards. It earned over $15 million worldwide, with distribution rights sold to more than seventy countries. Since then, it has been quoted, remade, referenced in countless ads and tributes — a symbol of the best kind of timeless cinema.
Today, Un homme et une femme is more than a classic. It’s a reminder that a film can be intimate and still speak to the world. That a story made without stars, without spectacle, can still travel globally — as long as it tells the truth about two people trying to reach each other.
The Cannes poster of 2025 isn’t nostalgia. It’s a declaration: the films that whisper are still being heard. Not just by critics. By the market.
Elena Saubanova
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