Word: truffauts
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...Mermaid. I laughed, in spots, as raucously as you can laugh in a nearly empty screening room. And I was swept, protesting, into a story I considered not only tired, but even maudlin in spots. The problem is that I, weaned as an appreciative viewer of foreign films on Truffaut, have come to expect perhaps too much of him. There is the inevitable disappointment that comes with a full house misplayed into three of a kind...
...called upon to entertain him. One thug claims to have a valuable possession. To back up the claim he say, "If this is not true, may my mother drop dead on the spot." Cut to the mother, dropping dead on the spot. This is early Truffaut, mixing genres eagerly, producing a film steeped in two classically American traditions -- slapstick and gangsters, with a third, sentiment mixed with melancholy that is curiously his own. It is this mixture, along with the autobiographical nature of these early films, that marked his potential...
...turns out that Truffaut isn't interested in genius. What surfaces here is caution. Stylistically, and structurally, we've all seen the match of Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me. In fact, the movie's most flamboyant technical act are its credits. They are highly contrasted, so that there are no middle ground greys, and then tinted in vivid pinks, greens, and oranges. A sequence of a car passing through the countryside, the effect is very surreal...
...rest of the story is Camille's, a chronicle of her ascendancy. She becomes a singer, or more accurately a star. Truffaut, who co-wrote the screenplay from Henry Farrell's novel, stresses her lack of morality. She kills and seduces with equal emotionlessness, even as she verbally seduces the naive sociologist. His complete trust, which becomes a more telling kind of hypnotism, is rewarded by betrayal. The act is in part a reemphasis of the insidiousness of her charm, for in framing Stanislas for a murder she committed (her fourth, with attempts at five and six also during...
...TRUFFAUT must, for the sake of reconciling his complex plot with his use of the comic, fuse his pasts and presents. The flashback technique is phased out by removing the interview scenes, which finally involve Stanislas in the comic action of the film. The first two-thirds of the film are episodic, a series of connected vignettes...