Those who always thought that A Man And a Woman was little more than a soap opera will find much evidence here to support their claim, although they will not have persuaded some of the rest of us that that is a bad thing. The idea of picking up a love story twenty years down the line is, if we take our lessons from the TV and radio models that gave the genre its name, the unashamed essence of soap opera: in a word or two, interminable duration. This is followed closely in essentiality by -- in another word or two -- sprawling population, and the present movie comes through on that score, too. Each of our lovers now has a new lover, and has had uncounted others in between; the daughter and son who first brought them together at that Deauville boarding school are now grown up and also have lovers, and others on the horizon. And there is a sex maniac on the loose whose connection to our nucleus of characters will not come clear until further along the road. But above and beyond the soap-operatic notion that life does tend to go on and on and on, A Man And a Woman: 20 Years Later seems to be very much an original idea for a sequel. It is as much a self-reflective and self-reflexive rumination on the previous movie as it is a continuation of the story of that movie. That is, it is as much a movie about A Man And a Woman as about the actual man and woman which the movie of that name was about. In consequence, anyone who wanted a mere repeat, of some sort, of the earlier romantic combustion will have cause to be disappointed. But this is, besides an original sort of sequel, also a true sequel and not a remake masquerading as one, and life does tend to go on. The viewer, to make up for the scantiness of any new wooing, will have to be willing to accept that the earlier love affair had been something special in the characters' lives; and any such viewer who thought that the earlier movie itself was something special should have no trouble doing that. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée; directed by Claude Lelouch. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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