Here’s a strange little experiment. Find the main theme from A Man and a Woman online, press play, and watch what happens about ten seconds in. Your shoulders settle. Maybe you start swaying without deciding to. And then comes the part nobody can resist — that wordless, sing-song refrain: dabadabada, dabadabada.

Chances are you’ve heard it before, even if you’ve never seen the film. It has drifted through café speakers, advertisements, and movie montages for nearly sixty years. It’s one of those tunes that feels less like a song you’re hearing for the first time and more like a memory you forgot you had.

That’s the quiet magic of Francis Lai. He didn’t write a melody to impress you. He wrote one to keep you company.

Who Was Francis Lai?

Francis Lai was a French composer, born in Nice in 1932, who came of age in the buzzing music scene of Montmartre, the artsy hilltop neighborhood of Paris. Before he ever touched a film score, he earned his living the old-fashioned way: playing accordion, writing songs in cafés, and eventually working as an accompanist for the legendary French singer Édith Piaf.

That background matters. Lai never trained as a conservatory composer churning out symphonies. He was a melodist — someone who thought in tunes you could hum on the walk home. When director Claude Lelouch went looking for a composer for his 1966 film, a mutual friend introduced him to Lai, and the two struck up a creative partnership that would last for decades.

If the name still rings a faint bell, here’s why: Lai later wrote the heart-tugging theme to the 1970 Hollywood film Love Story, the one that became a massive hit. He won an Academy Award for it. But many people quietly believe his earlier theme — the one we’re listening to today — is the more enchanting of the two.

The Story Behind the Music

The film A Man and a Woman (in French, Un homme et une femme) tells a gentle, melancholy story: a widow and a widower meet by chance at their children’s boarding school, and slowly, hesitantly, fall for each other. It’s a movie about second chances, and about how the past keeps tugging at the present even as new love tries to bloom.

Lai’s job was to capture that bittersweet in-between feeling — not pure joy, not pure grief, but something tender hovering between the two. He did it by reaching for an unexpected ingredient: bossa nova, the breezy Brazilian style that had swept the world in the early 1960s. Listen for the soft, plucked acoustic guitar and the relaxed, gently rocking rhythm. It gives the theme a warmth and lightness that keeps the sadness from ever turning heavy.

When the film premiered, it became an international sensation, sweeping up major awards. The music traveled even further than the movie. Over the years, singers from Ella Fitzgerald to Johnny Mathis recorded their own versions, and the theme became so familiar that, as one writer joked, you’d have to have been living in a cave in Siberia to have missed it.

How to Listen: Your Three-Minute Guide

You don’t need to know anything technical to enjoy this piece. But here are a few anchors to make your first real listen more rewarding.

The opening (0:00–0:30): Notice how it begins almost shyly — a plucked guitar, a soft rhythmic pulse, like someone tapping a gentle beat on a tabletop. There’s no grand announcement. The music simply slips in beside you.

The main melody (around 0:30): Here comes the tune itself, usually carried by piano or strings. It has a rising-and-falling shape that feels like a sigh — reaching upward hopefully, then drifting back down. This is the emotional core: hope and wistfulness braided together.

The “dabadabada” refrain: This is the famous wordless vocal hook. Pay attention to how it sounds almost like humming — the kind of thing you’d do absentmindedly while happy. It’s intimate and human in a way lyrics never could be. There are no words because the feeling is bigger than words.

The whole experience lasts only a few minutes, and the secret is in that brevity. Lai never overstays his welcome. The theme says exactly what it needs to and then lets go, which is precisely why you’ll find yourself wanting to play it again.

Recordings Worth Hearing

If you’d like to explore beyond a single clip, here are a few directions depending on what you’re after.

For the authentic experience, seek out Francis Lai’s original 1966 soundtrack, often credited to the Francis Lai Orchestra. This is the version with the bossa-nova warmth fully intact — the closest thing to hearing the music exactly as the film’s first audiences did.

For a smokier, jazz-club mood, look for Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal interpretation. Hearing one of the greatest voices in jazz wrap itself around this melody reveals just how flexible and durable Lai’s tune really is.

And if you simply want the version that lives in the collective memory, almost any of the easy-listening orchestral recordings from the late 1960s will do — the kind of lush, string-soaked arrangement that made the theme a fixture of radio and lounges for a generation.

Why It Stays With You

Some music dazzles you and then fades. Other music quietly moves in and refuses to leave. Lai’s theme belongs firmly to the second kind.

What makes it endure isn’t complexity or cleverness. It’s the opposite — a disarming simplicity, a melody so natural it feels less invented than discovered, as though it had always existed and Lai merely happened to write it down first. That wordless refrain bypasses your thinking mind entirely and goes straight for something warmer and older.

So the next time you catch yourself humming dabadabada without quite knowing why, don’t fight it. That’s just Francis Lai, keeping you company across the decades — exactly as he intended.