This film is not about love, or even sex...

It is obvious that many times new ways of thinking, changes in culture and social outlook, can render insights into earlier historical moments and understandings. But I think the two previous posts on this thread also show what can be an unfortunate effect of such changes. Such effect is one where such "understandings" in fact become shorthand and unthinking ways of reaching easy categorizations, in effect pigeonholing something in a way that fails to completely and accurately understand it.

In short it is a huge mistake to see this film in terms of current feminist sexual politics, to see Bertrand as some sort of politically incorrect ogre.

Trufffaut instead I think intended us to see Bertrand as a much more complex character, a mix of good intentions, and in that regard certainly at least on the surface a high regard for women, with a kind of anxious searching that he fails to use to find an answer to what he lacks.

I find this film to be best understood in Existential terms. Bertrand like all others begins with a search for meaning, through care, in our relations with others. It is what Heidegger described as care being the essence of being with others. But in his case his existence is one of what seems an endless series of encounters with women. Why has his search for meaning taken this form?

On one level, we see how Bertrand's way is not providing what can be seen as anything near "an answer". He toys with the idea that his book may be a way of bridging the gap, using his experiences, as he recounts them, to reach others through the print medium. But no sooner does he finish the book than he realizes it will not do that, since it is incomplete. His editor says he can in effect finish his story by writing a second book, but not only does he not do that, we are skeptical he could ever have written that book. And what would such a book have meant when read together with his first book?

In fact it would have meant something, but would Bertrand himself have found the answer to the way the two should be understood together? Probably not.

In an overall sense then we understand why Bertrand led his life as he did, but also that he himself understood it was not giving him anything more than a limited answer in his search for meaning. His care for women as if you will a subcategory of people as a whole was on one level real. In that connection is it too limiting to see such care as some mere form of objectification. But it also evidently prevented him from reaching some greater level of care by entering into any more involved, meaning loving, relationship with any one woman he encountered. That this search apparently resulted, followed, his failed relationship with the one woman he had loved only made it more poignant and sad.

So, Bertrand ends up being a man who we understand suffered while seeking and to a great extent achieving what he on one level sought to do, but how such approach, such a perceived answer, failed to provide any ultimate meaning. As such his experience raises a distressing question how much his rapid frequency of encounters differs all that much from what is in effect the dominant mode of living for many if not most people, that being serial monogamy.

Perhaps not all that much.