Word: truffauts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Short: Rossellini, Godard, Truffaut, Clair, Polanski, Lester...
...Truffaut?s Julie (Catherine Deneuve) has the same curt amorality. When she learns that Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has killed a detective who?s been trailing them, she glances at the corpse and says, ?That?s one bastard less.? When Louis observes that ?You see evil everywhere,? she replies, ?It is everywhere.? Yet Truffaut wants Julie to be an alluring creature, so that Louis? love for her is elevated from masochistic wimpery to amour fou. Or at least amour noir. ?I know what you?re doing,? the ailing Louis tell her toward the end, ?and I don?t care...
...Mississippi Mermaid, 1969 Screenplay and direction by Truffaut, from the 1947 novel ?Waltz into Darkness? by William Irish...
...Mermaid? is dedicated to Renoir, but actually this is Truffaut?s Hitchcock film. Like ?Vertigo,? it?s story of a man in love with two women who are the same woman, and one of whom is dead - and who finally decides that he can love the second woman even though she impersonated the first woman and was responsible for her death. (Hope that?s clear.) But Woolrich?s novel came first...
...Even on the page, the siren-sucker relationship is a lot livelier than in Truffaut?s frozen ?Mermaid.? Which, by the way, never gets to Mississippi, or even to North America. The first setting is Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean; then Louis follows Julie to Marseille, and they finish in the snow of Switzerland. The movie?s emotional trajectory is also from hot to cold, earth tones to glacial whites. For a man obsessed, Belmondo plays it low-voltage; Deneuve is only the most gorgeous paperweight. The film has no heat, only humidity, and that in the early going...