This farce was supposedly conceived in response to a remark from Demy’s wife, Agnès Varda: “If you men could get pregnant, you’d behave differently with women.” Driving instructor Marcello Mastroianni and his hairdresser wife Catherine Deneuve are faced with an unexpected pregnancy—his. “Things we find abnormal now may be normal in the future,” says Marcello’s doctor; indeed, the film is both very much of its time (doctors smoking in the exam room, sets saturated in shades of orange) and, with its TV pundits debating socio-moral implications while marketers rejoice in pregnancy’s commercial possibilities, quite at home in ours.
