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Or, how Stanley Donen learnt how to stop worrying and love A Man and A Woman. Enjoyable, often very funny and intelligent, but just as often strained and overloud study of a married couple – Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn – and their twelve years of travelling, loving, and bickering.
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It’s not so much the film’s insistent hipster snap that’s problematic so much as the inability to find an exact note of intimacy, in a film that tries too hard to be with it. It’s cool that the film observes two imperfect people perfect for each-other, but the normally splendid Finney shouts through half the film, meaning that Hepburn wins by default, though it’s not her best performance as is sometimes said.
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The result is sort of like the sunny side up edition of writer Frederic Raphael’s much later script for Eyes Wide Shut as a tale of marital passion and infidelity, even including some similar refrains, like the daughter who’s a vague non-entity in the couple’s life, and the slick piece of tall, dark, handsome Euro-trash who cracks on to Hepburn. Donen’s mod direction imitates the playful, pretty energy of directors like Lelouch and Lester, but he doesn’t have the poise (or ear) necessary to capture a sinuous, truly substantial feel for romantic travails – the film almost mugs you with its beautiful-people charm. Still, I bet this was responsible for an awful number of unplanned babies late in ’68.
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