Claude Lelouch’s Palme d’Or-winning A Man and a Woman from 1966 treasures mood above all else.

Advertising, if not cinema, colonised these images long ago. Yet how to resist a pairing as photogenic as Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant?

It's full of misty romps in the meadows, rain-soaked windshields, assorted puppies and lambs, and a 'bittersweet' theme song that drones incessantly on the sound track.

Claude Lelouch’s hugely popular A Man and a Woman was criticized for its sleek, chic, starstruck, pie-eyed, romantic wish fulfillment. Yet therein lay its radicalism.