Word: truffauts
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EMERSON 210: Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, May 2, 3, 9, $1, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour...
Promoting for Sisters last week, De Palma told me he thought Truffaut's worst film making resulted from his admitted efforts to imitate Hitchcock. We both agreed that Truffaut's greatest homage was his book of conversations with Hitchcock. I hadn't seen Sisters then; now I think De Palma, too, should have put his homage into a book...
Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me gives this destructive dynamic still another odd twist. Truffaut makes Camille look and sound like a tomboy version of the ragamuffin youngsters who populate such chapters of his cinematic autobiography as Bed and Board. Camille's innocence, however, is chiding, manipulative, a weapon wielded with instinctual skill against a battery of eager victims...
...Truffaut's playful misogyny gives the movie a nice cutting edge, but it also unhinges it, quite as thoroughly as the hapless hero (Andre Dussollier) is eventually unhinged by Camille. A bookish, earnest, timid sociologist writing a thesis on criminal women, Dussollier interviews Camille in prison and becomes enraptured by her exploits; his scholarly dispassion buckles as she relates her history of adultery, theft and even-perhaps-murder. He becomes her vicarious paramour, and her champion, determined to prove her innocent of the murder of a lover (Charles Denner). She is, through his strenuous dedication, finally acquitted...
...Truffaut displays his distinctive and exuberant virtuosity; the film is briskly and surely made. The actors are fine, especially Denner, as a notably intense exterminator, and Guy Marchand, as a sleazy vocalist called Sam Golden who sports an extensive wardrobe of Damon Runyon gangster duds. But Bernadette Lafont can never find quite the proper combination of artfulness and amorality as Camille. She has an easy, unforced, energetic sexuality, but her ruthlessness does not seem to suit her. She tries too hard to act it, perhaps because it was never fully there in the script, which is concerned more with gymnastics...