Christmas Day this year meant our annual treat at home with a digital projector, a screen and a DVD – this time of the last film by François Truffaut. I’d not seen it before and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite having had too many glasses of wine. I’ve watched sequences again before starting this post.
I realise with horror that it is 50 years since I watched my first Truffaut, Baisers volés (1968), and I’ve grown old with the director’s alter ego Antoine Doinel. Over the years I have been mainly a faithful fan but occasionally I’ve become impatient with what I’ve seen as Truffaut’s failure to leave an adolescent view of women behind (which may also be a fear that I’m just as guilty). In this last film, which was released only a few months before his tragically early death, there are still traces of his adolescent desires but they are explored in a playful narrative. Added to that, the film stars his then partner the terrific Fanny Ardant and mixes together the director’s ‘personal’ cinematic flourishes with his love for Hitchcock and film noir/pulp fiction – and touches on other ideas about genre. Truffaut’s script, co-written with long-term collaborators Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, is an adaptation of the ‘hard-boiled’ crime novel The Long Saturday Night (1962) by Charles Williams. It’s appropriate in a way that Truffaut’s final film returns him to the world of noir fiction associated with the idea of the polar in France. Wikipedia suggests that much more of Williams’ work is currently in print in France than in the US. Truffaut’s three earlier forays in adapting similar books are Tirez sur le pianiste (1960, based on a David Goodis novel), La mariée était en noir (1968, Cornell Woolrich) and La sirène du Mississippi (1969 again based on a Cornel Woolrich novel). These last two films both feature femmes fatales in the form of Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. The difference in Vivement Dimanche! is that Fanny Ardant’s character is an investigator and we don’t think of her as possibly deceitful (though there are other women in the film who are). The film is also comic and almost surreal in certain scenes.
The film is set in Provence and begins with the murder of a duck hunter. We don’t get a good view of who pulls the trigger but suspicion immediately falls on Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who has been hunting in the same area. He runs an estate agency (real estate) and on return from his hunting trip falls out with his secretary/receptionist/office manager Barbara (Fanny Ardant). The case against Vercel strengthens when it is revealed that the murdered man was sleeping with Vercel’s wife. As coincidences and connections pile up and more murders follow, Vercel is forced into hiding and Barbara becomes the effective investigator of the crimes.
Truffaut decided to make the film, shot by Néstor Almendros, in black and white. According to Serge Toubiana, in the introduction included on the DVD, this decision caused problems with French TV which co-funded the production and at the time was committed to ‘colour-only’ productions. Truffaut felt that colour on his earlier noirs in 1968/9 was a mistake and he was justified to a certain extent in that Vivement Dimanche! was commercially successful. He also urged Almendros to work quickly to create a ‘B movie look’. In doing so he seems to have adopted a certain view of Hollywood film noir (several ‘A movie’ noirs, especially from RKO, seem to have been viewed as ‘B’s). It also confuses Truffaut’s other aim which seems to have been to create a Hitchcockian ‘romance thriller’. This type of film is often defined by The 39 Steps (1935) or its later version, North by North West (1959). In these films the hero is falsely accused, goes on the run and is helped by a woman. The couple fall for each other, but not before they have fought and perhaps deceived each other, unsure of the other person’s motives. The 39 Steps was a black & white Hitchcock, as were most of his films until the late 1940s. North by Northwest was widescreen and colour. Vivement Dimanche! melds some typical Hitchcockian use of close-ups and noir shadows with the more pulpish action of 1940s noir. Barbara at first seems to be in dispute with Julien but later becomes the active protagonist positively helping him. Truffaut’s regular composer Georges Delerue provides a score that is effective for suspense and danger but also for ‘romance’.
In the polar (roughly defined as the French crime film), there is often a specific relationship between the criminal protagonist and the police Inspector who is trying to catch him. The Inspector is also often a rather eccentric character. In Truffaut’s film, the chief police officer Santelli has his comedy moment when he fails to control the tap (faucet) on a wash basin, an incident which seems to confirm his status. The other added ingredient in the film is an amateur theatre troupe. Barbara is a member of the troupe and as well as comic interludes her role in the current production provides her with a costume which she finds herself wearing during her sleuthing – and then being forced to cover up with a raincoat. Truffaut reportedly dreamed up the idea of the narrative when somebody said that images of Fanny Ardant in a raincoat in her previous Truffaut film La femme d’à côté (1981) reminded them of film noir.
I think what surprised me most about the film was Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance as Julien. It seems rather stolid and lacking either the elegance of a Cary Grant or the vulnerability of a Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcockian versions of a similar character. But what it does do (presumably deliberately) is to thrown the spotlight on Fanny Ardant who is elegant, beautiful, resourceful and light-hearted – combining all the qualities of both partners in the Hitchcockian couple. Truffaut is often said to have favoured weak men and strong women and to have argued that stories need to be built around women rather than men. In Vivement Dimanche! he seemed finally to have found his female hero. Perhaps it is significant that at the end of the film, the line which I always associate with Truffaut, “Women are magic!”, is given to the murderer. Earlier in the film, Julien is seen staring at his wife’s legs as she fusses with her stockings a reference back to the almost fetishistic interest shown by Truffaut’s male characters in women who are often older or wiser. Fanny Ardant in heels is also taller than Jean-Louis Trintignant and reminds us of the scene in Baisers volés when Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Antoine Doinel walks with a woman who is a head taller. Other elements in the film linked to Truffaut’s personal interests include a popular cultural reference to pony-trap racing (trotting?) in Nice and a visit to the cinema which is showing Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths of Glory. Truffaut also repeats one of Godard’s questionable choices – asking his partner to play a prostitute, though in this case Fanny Ardant simply dresses appropriately in order to visit a red light district as part of her investigation.
The original novel was written in the 1960s and because of the choice of black & white and the avoidance of any modern(ist) architecture, I’m wondering if the film is meant to be set in the 1960s or to suggest the era. No doubt car enthusiasts could tell by the models on display. The Provence setting (IMDb suggests Hyères and Var as locations) makes me wonder whether some scenes were shot in the Victorine Studios in Nice (where Truffaut shot La nuit américaine in 1972) but research suggests that the studio was in a very bad way by 1983. Even so, some scenes feel like they are studio sets, including Julien’s ‘hideaway’ in the back of his business premises. This is one of the surreal elements in the film as Truffaut’s mise en scène and camera movement make it impossible to properly place how the back room leads into the front office (in other words it seems obvious that the police would search the building looking for him).
The plot extends the ‘long Saturday night’ or, at least, I think it does. The plotting is so loose that I wasn’t sure of the ‘story time’ or the geography of the events. The English-language title, Confidentially Yours seems almost meaningless. Despite this I think the film works very well as a stylish romp with Fanny Ardant excelling in her role. I must go soon to the previous Truffaut in which she stars as ‘the woman next door’.
The Case for Global Film 