A few by Truffaut.
Mississippi Mermaid (1969), directed by Francois Truffaut. Truffaut dedicates this film to Jean Renoir, and I assume he does so because of Renoir’s focus in his films on the machinations of people in love. In Mississippi Mermaid, Truffaut focuses on a fellow besotted by the beauty of his mail-order bride, a bride who is not the person he thinks she is, but this ultimately does not matter because he finds her so compellingly beautiful. The fellow, a rich owner of a cigarette factory on the island of Reunion (Jean-Paul Belmondo) remarks: “Before I met you, life seemed simple. Now I know it isn't. You really fouled things up." Yes, indeed. At one point in the action, Julie (Catherine Deneuve) and Louis (Belmondo) go to the cinema to see Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, and we know how the French directors of the New Wave loved Johnny Guitar. This noir western delivers a quirky love story suited to the sensibility we see in Mississippi Mermaid. Of course, the two leads in Truffaut’s film (Deneuve and Belmondo) bring their cinematic history with them to deepen the viewer’s experience. Deneuve’s work with Luis Bunuel and Belmondo’s with Godard enrich their roles here. This is a story of obsessive love. The heat emanating from these lovers has its counterpart in the snowy end to their time together.
A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972), directed by Francois Truffaut. Imagine the nastiest of film noir pictures melded with broad comedy, farce really. Well, if you can imagine such a film, then this just might be it. We have the rather dim noir hero who encounters the femme fatale, we have the narrative voice-over and flashbacks, we have people on the run, we have a prison, and we have a number of violent encounters. I stop to catch breath. We even have a Hitchcockian scene on a church tower. The whole thing is played for laughs, played broadly and even bawdily. Nice tracking shots carry us along. Lunacy, or should I say loonacy as in looney tunes, abounds. This is uncharacteristic for Truffaut. Or is it? We still have his interest in the intricacies and vagaries of the human heart. The action is fairly predictable, but the characters manage, just, to keep it interesting. The main male character, who ends up being a sap, is an academic who is writing a book on female criminals. The main female character is a prisoner who has quit a story to tell. The way she tells this story is not always the way we see the same story. Narrators can be unreliable.
The Woman Next Door (1981), directed by Francois Truffaut. The first thing I thought of after watching this film was King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. Duel in the Sun has the nickname, “Lust in the Dust,” and The Woman Next Door has little or no dust, but it does have the other. In a little village just outside Grenoble, France, next door neighbours find themselves embroiled in an old secret. Once again Truffaut considers affairs of the heart, its passions and desires and confusions and errors and intentions and complications. People play tennis, drive cars, have dinner, have encounters in the grocery store, have assignations here and there, draw conclusions on the wall. We have a narrator, a woman with a prosthetic leg who once threw herself from a window in despair after being jilted in love. Truffaut delivers his story with a Hitchcockian flair, the camera peeking at things best kept secret. I used to say I was not a fan of Truffaut, but this past while his films are nudging me to change my mind. This guy knows how to tell what might be a banal story in an intriguing manner.
Finally Sunday! (1983), directed by Francois Truffaut. This is Truffaut’s final film, and it ends with the camera focusing on a group of children kicking a camera lens back and forth, a fitting final metaphor for Truffaut and his compatriots in the ‘New Wave’. These directors kicked around the filmic experience in a playful manner, delivering a variety of cinematic pleasures. The cinematic pleasure here is Truffaut’s kicking about a blend of Hitchcock and cinema noir. And he has great fun doing this. The protagonist is Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a businessman who may or may not be a murderer. He is on the lam, out to prove his innocence. Sound familiar? Like Hitchcock protagonists, Vercel is aided by his loyal secretary, Barbara Becker (Fanny Ardant). They meet the usual suspects in their adventures. As in Hitchcock films, the viewer is offered snippets that may or not prove helpful in figuring out who did what. Shot in black and white by Nestor Almendros, the film looks vibrant. Now a confession: I watched this film while feeling quite drowsy and so I should really watch it a second time when I am more alert. The film deserves close attention. What, for example, does Kubrik’s Paths of Glory have to do with this film? Also why does Truffaut reference Convoi de la peur (1977), an American film (Sorcerer) based on a French film, Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur, 1953)? In other words, Finally Sunday! has many details for the observant viewer.
