Dated? In more than one way. To begin with, Charles Denner might be a dependable actor, but he is the wrong casting choice for the Lothario. Although his character is clearly smart, well read and kind (enough) to the women he beds, he has a smoker' skin and smoker's voice on top of a middle-age lassitude in his posture: it is a stretch to believe in the spectacular powers of attraction the script gives him. I venture to say that the dozens of girls he is shown seducing are pure movie fantasy.
Brigitte Fossey is wasted in too small a part, and her character of a sharp literary agent quickly seduced by her client -no, really?- is another fictional trope. (In truth all the women in the plot are wasted.) And on the whole, for all the chasing that propels this plot, the story goes nowhere -turns in a circle- because its viewing angle is 100% masculine all along. The women in the plot have no consistency -they don't have a chance to, or it was not in the filmmaker's intention or talent to show texture to their characters. These women are all legs and desires- no thoughts of their own. As a 2018 viewer, I find neither lightness nor poetry -let alone instruction on human nature- in that point of view: I see a chosen perspective that is both offensive and dated. At some point, we are even presented with the trope of the "crazy nympho" qualified without irony as the most "interesting" of all his conquests,-according to our Casanova. Paging the 70s, baby! Watch ALFIE instead ( 1966, with Michael Caine): a much better (and more fun) film around the same topic, in my opinion.
Review of The Man Who Loved Women
