 | This 1964 melodrama was a change of direction for Truffaut, whose "The 400 Blows" (1959), "Shoot the Piano Player" (1960) and "Jules and Jim" (1962) helped define the French New Wave. This his fourth feature was deemed Truffaut’s bid for commercial success and is essentially a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an love. It is also testament to the New Wave movement's love affair with American genre. |
| This 1964 melodrama was a change of direction for Truffaut, whose "The 400 Blows" (1959), "Shoot the Piano Player" (1960) and "Jules and Jim" (1962) helped define the French New Wave. This his fourth feature was deemed Truffaut’s bid for commercial success and is essentially a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an love. It is also testament to the New Wave movement's love affair with American genre. Here is the stuff more suited to bourgeoisie soap opera, although it is fairly scathing about France's intellectual elite via the crisis of social embarrassment. This is the story of Pierre (Jean Desailly) a well groomed Parisian literary editor and famous author and a young air attendant Nicole (Francoise Dorleac). Both actors shine in the film. Desailly plays this straight as the mostly clueless, nondescript lead – awkward, plain and everyman in some ways, universal in his actions. Doreleac however is sultry, impulsive and attractive – she tragically died three years after this film was made in a car crash. She made the thriller ‘That Man From Rio’ opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo and Roman Polanski’s ‘Cul-de-sac’. She is superb in this and died too young… | Truffauts regular collaborators, composer Georges Delarue and Cinematographer Raoul Coutard add to the beauty of the film. Delarue created works for Jean-Luc Godard Contempt (Le Mépris), for Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, and Bernardo Bertolucci, and of course Truffaut: ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ ‘Love on the Run’, ‘Day For Night’, ‘The Last Metro’, ‘Jules et Jim and others… Here the mood is playful and upbeat. Coutard’s cinematography is superb – his camera created icons of the women of the new wave in such films as: ‘Breathless’, ‘Le Mepris’ ‘Bande a part’, ‘Pierrot Le Fou’ and ‘Jules et Jim’. Truffaut’s direction is definitely stylish in not just the compositions he creates but also in the way he presents much of the film’s drama with freeze frames, jump-cuts and dissolves all commonplace. Truffaut and Coutard use the close-up shot throughout not only to insinuate seduction and lust, but impending tension and destruction, often constructed around knowing glances and subtle touches. There are obvious Hitchcockean voyeuristic elements also at work, as Pierre watches Nicole change her clothes from behind a curtain, so reminiscent of ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Psycho’… Truffaut’s film is definitely in a darker realm, a sinister place where characters cannot escape their costly romantic decisions and a harsher reality rules. |
