Word: franju
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Francois Mauriac adapted his Nobel-prize winning book, and Georges Franju--an allegedly fast rising young artist--directed two talented performers, Emmanuele Riva (of Hiroshima Mon Amour) as Therese, and Philippe Noiret (of Zazie) as Therese's husband, Bernard. It's hard to believe that such talent could belch up such obvious junk...
Therese appears obnoxious not because she marries the boor in the first place, nor because she fails even to try to make a go of it (this girl's so sensitive she's a fish in her wedding bed). What is so insufferable is that Mauriac and Franju create such a sympathetic Therese...
...Mauriac and Franju are no fools; why did they cast Therese as a sensitive heroine to begin with? The fault lies as much with their adaption of the novel as with the direction. By cutting the story of Therese's failure to make a new life in Paris, of her degeneration into a paranoid and confused old lady, they change a tragic character into a superficial...
...intelligent direction could have saved the film, Franju was not up to it. With a sophisticated modern audience, problems of subconscious motivations and existential living require subtlety and understatement. Perhaps Truffaut's achievement in Jules and Jim is too much to ask, but when Franju has his lead remark, "Don't you realize how useless we are?" it's embarrassing...
Bernard survives, however. He even lies to save her, and as Thérèse rides home from court to try to tell him why she did it, her unhappy history is reviewed in flashbacks. Here, the prose narrative becomes a burdensome, bookish device, but Director Georges Franju finds visual poetry in sharp contrasts between the gentle Bordeaux countryside and the taut, terrible stillness of Thérèse's face. Actress Riva never fails him. On her wedding day, "the wild force seething inside," she stands in church like someone paralyzed by news of disaster...