Word: coutard
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...screenplay, by Jorge Semprum and Costa-Garvas, is taut and suspenseful. Raoul Coutard's photography cannot be faulted and is particularly adept in its use of cold steel-like colors to add to the cauchemar feeling of the film. Costa-Garvas' direction is lickety-split and sometimes brilliant (his groupings of the pacifist heroes to show simultane-ously their solidarity, strength and fear; the demonstration scenes, which accomplish effortlessly what Haskell Wexler wasted a whole film on in Medium Cool...
...first half-hour shows (as did Contempt and Pierrot le Fou) that the man can cut a narrative like nobody's business when he puts his mind to it. Mireille Darc's much-discussed monologue is, though a single shot, the purest kind of narrative cinema (combined with Coutard's carressing camera movement and Antoine Duhamel's brilliant score)--as is the long track along stalled traffic ending with corpses on the road. These scenes will become classics, and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't all be the happier...
...understandable, are nonetheless private acts in which we cannot share. Flashback sequences, so purgative and cathartic in Hitchcock, are coldly detached in The Bride Wore Black, existing in a no-man's-land between Julie and the audience; the slow motion sequence is stylistically justifiable only if we interpret Coutard's contemplative panning as emerging from a half-memory of Julie's too personal for us to experience. The last shot of the film also deprives us of the vision we are accustomed to: Julie's final killing is very much her own, and though we will make...
...Bride Wore Black is perhaps less an homage to Hitchcock than Truffaut's own attempts at working Hitchcock-style, planning every shot and cut in advance of the shooting. Coutard's claustrophobic framing suggests "plan-sequence," sketches of shots realized by the camera, and there are no traces of the nouvelle vague hand-held technique of Truffaut's films through Soft Skin. A shot will follow a telephone wire in close-up through two rooms, stopping briefly at a closeup of the phone, then dollying into a medium close shot of the victim, unaware his phone wire has been severed...
...womanizer who smirks curiously at Moreau until she pushes him off a balcony and his face turns from pure narcissism to pure terror. Another director might have made the balcony scene an urban one; Truffaut stages it along the Côte d'Azur, where Photographer Raoul Coutard makes the outside beckon like a Cezanne landscape. Even a minute role played by a little boy is observed with special insight. When Moreau puts on glasses and tries to con the boy into accepting her as his teacher, he reacts with an air of whimsical gamesmanship...