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François Truffaut and the fascination of "love scenes filmed like murder scenes." It opens with a dash to the airport but slows downs for the meeting up in the air, the young stewardess (Françoise Dorléac) introduced as a pair of ankles behind a curtain to the boyishly middle-aged literary academic (Jean Desailly). Illuminating giddiness for the anticipation of the affair, then lights out and tender nervousness in the hotel room, split-second freeze-frames before they part ways. That the wife back home (Nelly Benedetti) is warm and loving and increasingly drained by the betrayal ensures that this is no cheery triangle, but rather the filmmaker's pointed rejection of his own Jules and Jim image as a dispenser of cozy lyricism. The clandestine couple's thwarted sojourn in Reims gives a quick view of the artiste as weathered pug (Allégret's Avec André Gide), the squirming spectacle of Desailly's frozen smile at a committee dinner, and Pascal's statement of theme ("I've learned that man's unhappiness arises from the inability to stay quietly in his own room"). The idyll at the cottage ponders the flabbergasted awe of a bashful bourgeois as he gently unhooks the stockings of his half-asleep mistress, a kitten laps at the breakfast tray left outside their room. "You've made a real mess of things." Losey would have wrung cruel, rousing comedy out of such "unresolved situations," Truffaut on the other hand is too conscious of everyone's feelings not to steer them toward tragic melodrama. Quine's Strangers When We Meet is indicated here and there, the use of tell-tale objects (ripped telegrams, matchboxes with phone numbers, snapshot stubs) prepares the Hitchcockian irruption of trench coat and shotgun at the close. "Trop tard," the fool and his punchline. (The Man Who Loved Women has it from a different angle.) With Daniel Ceccaldi, Laurence Badie, Philippe Dumat, Paule Emanuele, and Sabine Haudepin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |