The French Collection
Oscar-winning and decades-spanning filmmaker Claude Lelouch continues to make popular movies
From 1958 to 1978, the French film industry completely dominated the international feature Oscar race (formerly known as foreign language film), scoring eight wins out of 21 contests. Italian cinema also boasted a robust run during that period, earning seven international picture wins out of 14 nominations from 1956 to 1974, with four of those wins to the amazing Italian auteur Federico Fellini.
All of which makes the career of French writer-director Claude Lelouch even more incredible: he won one of those international pic Oscars for France back in 1966 for his romantic classic “A Man and a Woman,” and at 86 years young, he’s still making films today.
Perhaps no European filmmaker better exemplifies the impact of the Continental Drift that captured the hearts of mainstream moviegoers, and inspired the New Hollywood filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s to rethink the way they were telling stories.
Lelouch also won an original screenplay Oscar for “A Man and a Woman” — a rarity for a foreign-language film — and also garnered noms for his direction and his enchanting lead actress, Anouk Aimee. And 10 years later, Lelouch scored another original screenplay Oscar nomination for his lesser known, but equally dazzling love story “And Now My Love.” Lelouch’s enduring popularity has also attracted an enduring army of naysayers, one of whom was Variety’s Gene Moskowitz, who sniffily reviewed “A Man and a Woman” at the Cannes Film Festival, just before the film scooped the Palme d’or (technically, the Grand Prize in 1966).
Unlike his Gallic helming colleagues of the era such as Jean-luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais, Lelouch may be near the top in terms of French commercial success, but his critical standing remains in flux.
Back at Cannes, days before his first major triumph, Moskowitz called Lelouch “the do-it-yourself ” filmmaker, noting “he has made several pix as director, writer and cameraman and even produced via his own company. He now repeats with a little more ambition.” While he does credit the filmmaker with “unfettered joy in filming his scenes,” he also dismisses “A Man and a Woman” as “banal” and “glossy” and predicted the film will require “nursing for foreign payoff.”
That “nursing” must have come through as the film wound up playing on screens in the U.S. for nearly two years and stood for decades as one of the biggest foreign-language hits ever produced.