INTIMACY (Patrice Chéreau, 2001)

Uncommonly bold in its depictions of the sexual intercourse that Jay and Claire, its two lead characters, have each Wednesday afternoon in Jay’s London ghetto flat, Intimacy rivets much of our attention. I did not feel like a voyeur during these potent scenes, despite the fact that, clearly, the two lead actors, Mark Rylance and delicious Kerry Fox (best actress, Berlin) were really doing the nasty, in part because director Patrice Chéreau selects and orchestrates so compellingly the sounds of sex that I felt swept up in the matter—implicated, even. But for these grunts and sighs and associated noises, sex between these two is silent. Jay and Claire know nothing about one another (except that, obviously, Claire knows where Jay lives), including each other’s name. Every Wednesday, like fuckwork, they get down to business sans foreplay or aftplay. There is no apparent tenderness to their trysts.

I say “apparent” because there are things the camera cannot or, at least on certain occasions, doesn’t reveal. The camera is quicker to expose bodies in heat than to show warmth of the emotional (rather than perspirational) kind, much less the merging of souls. I, for one, am sickened by the sort of sexual representation one finds in such a film as Louis Malle’s Les amants (The Lovers, 1959), where a plush bed, lyrical dissolves, and an onslaught of string instruments on the soundtrack conspire to rob participants of their bodily presence. I much prefer the graphic, animalistic sex that we see in Chantal Äkerman’s Je tu il elle (1974), where two women, one of them being Äkerman herself, really get down to it. Still, my interpretation may be at odds with how others see one of cinema’s great sexual encounters. Äkerman will not defile the sexual act with a sentimental, that is, sweetly rapturous rendering; on the other hand, there is more to the event than the camera perceives, and whatever you wish to call that—emotional, spiritual, “human” rather than animalistic—is reserved for the participants. It isn’t for us observers to see and, in any case, the camera cannot honestly show it. The spiritedness of the sex, though, implies the depth of the experience in which Äkerman and her partner are engaged.

Chéreau may be implying, then, that there is more to the Jay-Claire encounters than we can possibly see or Chéreau can possibly show. The plot (from Hanif Kureishi’s stories “Intimacy” and “Night Light”), though, seems to dictate purely superficial encounters—if you will, the satisfaction of overwhelmingly desperate need on the part of both lovers. Jay, who is divorced, eagerly anticipates the Wednesday sessions; his whole being bends in the direction of their promise. But does Claire feel the same way? One day, Jay follows her and discovers her life apart from his. She is an actress, a wife and a mother. He had been a musician; his divorce has deprived him of steady access to his children. Now he works as a bartender. Dogged by feelings of failure, he shoots off about how other bartending members of his staff are really actors and other artists waiting for a real job to come through for them. We sense that Claire was intended to provide equilibrium in the face of Jay’s perceived sense of failure; and now she seems to have everything that he doesn’t have and, so, Jay strikes out at her and her marriage—and, in this way, at himself.

Reviewer Roger Ebert sees Jay as a brutal misogynist who is likely a repressed homosexual in denial of his homosexuality. Hm. Jay doesn’t seem to like women much. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to like anybody, including himself. In a flashback, his wife at the time suggests that he doesn’t even love his sons. Until his detective work clarified her life for him, however, Claire was the one person he could count on. Their anonymity softened the blows with which the specific details of his world daily assaulted him. The “revealed” Claire therefore triggers an ontological crisis, but there is also a socioeconomic dimension to this.

Claire’s spouse, Andy, is a taxi cab driver, and his financial support allows Claire to pursue her interests in stage acting and acting instruction. Andy doesn’t believe that Claire has much talent, and little that we see either in her performance as Laura in a fringe production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie or in the class she runs contests his low opinion of her. Who knows whether Jay has musical talent? Regardless, he has had to do what so many others have to do: cash in his dream in order to survive. There is no Andy in his life who can subsidize his artistic pursuit. Jay targets Claire and Andy with this frustration of his, as indeed he targets younger co-workers most of whom will also eventually have to give up their dreams. The film, however, may be implying that society is to blame for failing to provide sufficient means of support for artistic pursuit. Indeed, it’s scarcely less the case that Claire herself might have achieved more artistically had her financial support not been tangled up in her marriage. Her current situation curbs her artistic pursuit while at the same time providing the means for it. Claire, like Jay, is not free, and it’s a shame that he (temporarily) comes to see her as the enemy. In truth, theirs is a common enemy that quashes dreams and stifles gifts.

Claire remains with Andy, who, soured by her adultery, lambasts his wife with a meanness and fury that outdistance anything that Jay has come up with. Andy confronts Claire with her alleged lack of acting talent and wonders aloud about what she could possibly teach any actors-in-training. It is achingly to the point, it seems to me, that he unloads this invective on her while he is driving his cab and she is seated in the back of the cab. The mise-en-scène screams “power of the purse strings,” underlining the state of Claire’s economic dependency on her spouse. Intimacy exposes a society that indulges practicality and gives short shrift to art and to artists.

The film’s primary weakness lies in its premise. Because words do not pass between Jay and Claire until they become confrontational, we cannot imagine how the two came together in the first place. Nor does the film help us out by providing an explanation of this, such as in a flashback. But the film also has strengths—for instance, the stormy script by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic, Chéreau’s assured use of hand-held camera, and the performances by Fox, Rylance and Timothy Spall, who plays Andy.

Intimacy, which is in English, is from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. It won the top film prize, the Golden Bear, at Berlin; in France, it won Chéreau the Prix Louis Delluc for the year’s best film and the Lumière Award as best director. It has been widely panned in Britain and the United States.

Those who ought to know better always pretend that they do.

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LIFE IS TO WHISTLE (Fernando Pérez, 1998)

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy doing other things.” — John Lennon

Resplendent with symbolism, allegory, myth and magic realism, Fernando Pérez’s La vida es silbar begins with a woman named Cuba who takes in orphans only to abandon them. Robust, flamboyant imagery and delicate charm effortlessly combine as Bebé, one of Cuba’s orphans—once a problem child for whistling in school rather than speaking—and a projection of Santa Barbara, humanity’s protector from thunder, lightning and other dangers, and of Chango, the African ruler of thunder and lightning, now 18, lords over Havana, which in her gigantic gaze is a toy-sized model of reality, conjuring the fates of three separate lives that ultimately bring them to the Plaza de la Revoluciòn at the same appointed time on the same day.
     Mariana, Julia and Elpidio are grown orphans. Each needs a happy resolution, each coping with some sense of lovelessness due to Mother Cuba’s abandonment. It is Bebé’s ambition to share with them what she says is her happiness. How do we reconcile then this claim and Bebé’s sullen appearance? By transcending chronology and looking through the other end of the emotional telescope. The happiness of her sister and brother orphans will be Bebé’s happiness.
     Ballerina Mariana intends to deny herself sex and romance permanently, asking God for the lead in a production of Giselle as reward; hospital-worker Julia gets ill even at the mention of sex; libidinous musician Elpidio’s capacity for love has been crippled by his inability to let go of heartache over his maternal abandonment.
     Pérez’s film projects the delicious sense of a passing storm. It celebrates life, Cuba and freedom, and is wise in the ways that we collaborate with circumstance to limit our experience of the last of these.

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SALT (Bradley Rust Gray, 2003)

Despite the biblical implication, the title of Salt refers to our abiding origins in the sea. En route from a small fishing village to Reykjavik, Iceland’s capitol city, to join her older sister, Svava, Hildur and Svava’s boyfriend, Aggi, are stranded in the middle of nowhere when their car breaks down. Hildur and Svava find it increasingly hard to resist the attraction between them; as a result, while Aggi is asleep Hildur leaves by bus for regions of the imagination, willing herself into becoming a gray seal. The seal with which, underwater, Hildur plays at the end of Salt: is it Svava or Aggi?
     This exceptionally lovely piece of work, by U.S. filmmaker Bradley Rust Gray, was shot on digital video and transferred to 35mm. Its handheld camera use asserts reality, but its destiny is another realm entirely, one innocent of betrayal or other moral consequences, and of guilt. The actors improvised much of their own dialogue. Gray works in partnership with his South Korean-born spouse, So Yong Kim, who produced Salt.
     With its slippery maneuvering out of the grip of modern angst, Salt is a reincarnation of L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) for the twenty-first century. It is a younger version as well. Expressing hopefulness, it is a look ahead into the past of humanity, a magical fusion of disparate realms encapsulated in a wonderful long-shot—in the main, this is a work of closeups—in which a naked Hildur, the raised, immobile camera behind her, moves in the direction of the soothing sea, her once and future home.

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DAY FOR NIGHT (François Truffaut, 1973)

The term la nuit américaine—what in Hollywood is called day for night—refers to the practice, originating in Hollywood, of shooting night scenes in daylight, wherein a gradient tint over the image generates the appearance of moonlit night. The title of François Truffaut’s tragicomic La nuit américaine (Day for Night)—a film about the shooting of a (faux) film, Je vous presente Pamela (Meet Pamela)—thus refers more generally to the magic of cinema, its capacity to conjure a seeming reality from trick methods and artificial elements. Truffaut, who himself plays Ferrand, the scenarist-director of Meet Pamela, made La nuit américaine in part to express his boundless love of cinema, but the mediocre result he achieved suggests other motivations as well.

There is, of course, no doubting former film critic Truffaut’s love of film. He has dedicated La nuit américaine to Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and periodic inserts (in black and white in an otherwise color film) of a boy stealing a poster advertising Citizen Kane refer to the life-changing event, for him, of seeing Orson Welles’s film when it first appeared in France in 1946, when Truffaut struck puberty. Various long shots of actors on their marks, still until the cameras start rolling, whereupon they are suddenly in motion, indeed have a magical, intoxicating effect, and, though less effective, the various confusions between “real” and “Pamela” actions—action either in the film or in the film-within-the-film—possess some charm. Moreover, the film’s most moving and electric moment consists of Ferrand listening on the phone to music that Georges Delerue has composed for Meet Pamela—it’s the poignant main theme of Delerue’s score for La nuit américaine—while opening a package of new books about some of the filmmakers both Ferrand and Truffaut (and the rest of us) love: Dreyer, Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, and so forth. This one moment, likely to reduce to tears anyone who loves film, is irresistibly lovely.

Alas, the majority of the film fails to approach this level of accomplishment. The various “real-life” activities of the actors playing in Meet Pamela, including their romantic entanglements, are pure soap opera; the revelation that one cast member, a revered former matinee idol, is gay is corny in the extreme. But even all this, including a surprise death, is somewhat more engaging than the Meet Pamela stuff, which for the most part is laughable (though not funny). Valentina Cortese, as an aging actress who can’t remember her lines or which door is which on the set, is terrific; her tour-de-force, which won her numerous awards both here and in Europe, is untouched by the film’s weakness. (We eventually learn the personal reason for the actress’s professional distraction. This is a film of delayed explanations.) On the other hand, it’s unmistakable that (1) Meet Pamela is going to be a dreadful movie and that (2) Truffaut in no way takes this into account or seems to reflect on the fact to the thematic advantage of his film. Some of the film is enjoyable; Cortese, Jacqueline Bisset* and, most of all, Jean-Pierre Léaud, after all, are wonderful actors. Léaud indeed takes the role of young Alphonse from endearing to frighteningly neurotic as Alphonse’s romantic life crumbles beneath him, dissolving a part of his fragile ego. The actors are not the problem. The tedious script is. The scenarists are Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman.

Why then did Truffaut make this film? What besides his love for cinema motivated him? I hate to state the obvious, but Truffaut sought the adulation that a bourgeois entertainment—for that’s pretty much all La nuit américaine is—might bring him. The authentic artist who had made The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules and Jim (1961) had already taken a drastic step on this degenerate path. The year before, his Les deux Anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls) had appeared in the vastly reduced version that Truffaut agreed to and fashioned himself once his producer balked at the original length and the film’s radical nature. (In the mini-version, le continent—in effect, the French boy whom Jean-Pierre Léaud plays—takes precedence over the two girls, who, based on Charlotte and Emily Brontë, are after all English, not French, and are played by English actresses, Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter.) In time, Truffaut would come to regret his cutting the film; but in 1973, what he had helped do made him ripe for something equally unconscionable: La nuit américaine. Painfully ambivalent about whether he should function as artist or entertainer, Truffaut must have found that the mutilation of his Two English Girls made the decision that much easier for him; to shore up a wobbly ego, he would pursue profits and the audience acceptance that came with them. The final dismal proof of his sell-out is his participation (as actor) in Steven Spielberg’s soulless, buck-chasing monstrosity Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). I can’t recall whether it was before or after his death (from a brain tumor) in 1984 that Les deux Anglaises et le continent was restored to the fullness of Truffaut’s original wondrous vision. How different the last decade of his career is likely to have been if only he hadn’t compromised so radiant an instance of genuine art!

His compatriot Jean-Luc Godard, we all know, was shocked and disgusted by what he saw as La nuit américaine unrolled. Brutally, he may have (unconscionably) ended their friendship at that time; but he gave the world something remarkable in its stead: Numéro Deux/Essai Titres (1975), a film about the making of a film made as a direct response to Truffaut’s. Whereas Truffaut’s film is small and packaged, Godard’s is vast and exploratory. Whereas Truffaut’s film is staid and respectable, Godard’s is visually and intellectually adventurous. Whereas the director in Truffaut’s film soothes the frayed feelings of his actors and is most anxious about getting the film done by the time the money-people have designated for completion of the project, the director in Godard’s film worries most about the expressive nature of the form of his film, the thematic development of his material, and, above all, his responsibility as artist in the context of the larger world. (In Godard’s film, the film-within-a-film isn’t some faux-film but is the same film that Godard’s turns out to be.) Whereas Truffaut’s film functions apart from political concerns but nevertheless implies a political stance by the bourgeois accents it contains, Godard’s film addresses contemporary social and political problems, demonstrating in vigorous detail how the workplace, and how it’s organized and conducted, intrude upon and distort all other aspects of a person’s life.

I love Truffaut. How I miss him. (How we all miss him!) He was a jewel. Claude Miller’s The Little Thief (1989), moreover, is proof that Truffaut left behind a superlative story that, had he lived to make a film of it himself, likely would have signaled his renaissance as an artist—an event to which the restoration of Les deux Anglaises et le continent doubtless would have immensely contributed. There, Truffaut could see the great things he was born to accomplish. But what piddle is La nuit américaine**—something I regret to say even led Truffaut, more than a decade before Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather III, to make yet another Antoine Doinel film, Love on the Run (L’amour en fuite, 1979), purely to fill coffers, nearly a decade after the Doinel series had legitimately ended with Bed and Board (Domicile conjugal, 1970). This he followed with the financially triumphant The Last Metro (1980), a mediocrity that manipulates its audience no less than does The Sting or Jaws. The reduction of an artist is always a sad, even a tragic event, however it comes about. The downward trajectory of Truffaut’s aspiration and achievement provides a lesson for all artists—and a warning that death is ever poised to intervene to keep one from rejoining the ranks of the truly expressive and creative.

Keep working as an artist then, focused on the formal development of your feelings and ideas. Share your work, letting the character and strength of the work bring others to it; don’t corrupt your soul by compromising your work in the hope of bringing it to anyone (and everyone). What you owe you owe to art, not to an audience. It isn’t for you to pander to the audience; it’s for you to do your job well enough so that an audience—those capable of appreciating your work, however small the number—come to your work. If you aim to have as many people as possible like your work, you aren’t doing your job. You’re dancing with the devil. Keep doing your job.

Keep the faith—as, whatever form it has taken, Truffaut’s soul surely now wishes it had done: a wish prepared to taunt his soul for the rest of eternity.

* Bisset’s Julie Baker refers directly to Bisset’s own troubled mental history. Like Richard Brooks’s direction of soon-to-be-ex-wife Jean Simmons as an alcoholic whose troubled life echoes her own, in The Happy Ending (1969), Truffaut’s film seems to tread a reality/nonreality line that hits spots both sensitive and cruel. However, I am certainly not suggesting that anyone is more qualified than Jacqueline Bisset to play (in effect) Jacqueline Bisset.

** Goodness knows, many love the film. (And why not? The film courts their affection.) La nuit américaine was named the year’s best film by the French critics, the British Film Academy, the National Society of Film Critics, and the New York Film Critics Circle, all of which also named Truffaut best director. The film also won the Oscar as best foreign-language film. But what avails an artist if he gains a lot of praise and prizes and loses his way?

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THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (François Truffaut, 1968)

Following publicity at the time of its release, many commentators took François Truffaut’s formally breathtaking The Bride Wore Black (La mariée était en noir) as an Hitchcockian exercise—a practical coda to Truffaut’s book of conversations with “the master of suspense.” Truffaut himself, though, described the film in terms incompatible with this, as his attempt, in fact, to reconcile the disparate influences on his work of Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. The result, based on a novel by William Irish, is a bold, intriguing film that is about matter quite different from what is generally attributed to it.

The plot is simple, and lethal. At her wedding Julie Kohler wore the white she was entitled to wear; but a stupid accident, involving a high-powered rifle and five carousing bachelors in a hotel room across the way and up, left Julie’s bridegroom, whom she had loved since childhood, dead on the church steps. Stopped from committing suicide, Julie opts for a definitive coping strategy: she tracks down the five men, insinuates herself into their lives (as Annette Insdorf has pointed out) as an object of desire (although she shifts gears to get at the last), and murders them one by one. Hers, then, is a grim mission of revenge and a sustained shout of pain.

The film unfolds as an elegant series of mildly described murders. It opens with a rapidly flipping succession of identical images of Julie naked, photographed from the studio wall where one of her victims had painted her—a witty visual APB disclosing from the start Truffaut’s interest in Julie’s sexual predicament. For hasn’t Julie rendered herself the mere image of a sexual person by her unRenoirian decision to postpone making love with her beloved until after the wedding? Her love and fidelity now hopelessly relegated to uninterrupted celibacy, she is consumed by her folly; the death of her would-have-been-lover incorporates her costly choice of maidenly virginity. That this choice of hers is the actual source of her suffering and anguish, which her killing spree merely attempts to hide from herself (a displacement of her thwarted suicide), The Bride Wore Black suggests along a number of different, converging tracks: narrative, rhythmic and visual.

Each of the murders that Julie commits—a push resulting in a deadly fall; a poisoning; a suffocation by lock-up in a tight space; the piercing with an arrow; a stabbing—constitutes an act of sublimated sex. Underscoring this in the first four instances, in fact, is the victim’s presumption that he and Julie are on the threshold of having sex. To be sure, this is partly the result of arrogance; but it is arrogance—male vanity—that Julie knowingly exploits. Thus we may say that Julie seduces her “intendeds” toward their demise, substituting for sex symbolic sex—the sublimated sex of killing them. Since Julie herself is implicated in this substitute sex, it follows that her killing each of the men is a substitute means of killing herself. The self-inflicted weapon is her constant awareness of the choice of virginity that she made. Every time Julie commits murder, then, she is punishing herself with her own choice to delay becoming sexually active. Why wouldn’t she crave and seek such punishment?; for, in her shattered soul, her unconscious, a nexus of causality has asserted itself: had she made the correct choice and made of her beloved her lover before the wedding, this would have reversed the outcome; there would have been no shooting, she and the bridegroom would have proceeded to their honeymoon and, as wife and husband, would have lived happily ever after. It is the irrational “logic” of overwhelming regret and guilt.

One aspect of the film’s (marvelous) structure clarifies this underlying theme; for Truffaut delays the full disclosure of Julie’s overt motivation for the string of murders—to take revenge on her bridegroom’s killers—until the third in the series, thereby allowing the crimes themselves, by their sexual reverberations and symbolism, to delineate more accurately what in fact drives Julie than does her own rationale for the crimes. Truffaut thus gives us time to bring to bear our own analytical skills; his delay of Julie’s “explanation” provides us with the means for better understanding Julie than Julie understands herself—and before her self-misunderstanding can cloud or confuse this better understanding of ours. Our active analysis of her motivation leads us away from passively accepting Julie’s self-analysis.

The flow of images—which comprises not just the images themselves but also the way they are cut into a continuous compound—likewise contributes to our search for a sexual motivation for the crimes. This flow determines the film’s rhythm; it is a rhythm suggesting a steadily proceeding distant train: persistent, low-keyed, electric. (Assisting Truffaut here is the unsung genius who also edited his Jules and Jim, 1961: Claudine Bouché.) This visual rhythm, combined with the rhythmic though often unharmonized strains of Bernard Herrmann’s quietly insistent music, reiterates the sexual underpinnings of Julie’s mission.

Two of the film’s images further help us in discerning Truffaut’s thematic concerns. One, in fact, is a series of images showing Julie, as an artist’s model, dressed in a white tunic as the Greek goddess Diana, the huntress; the white of the garment connects with the virginal white of Julie’s wedding gown (and of other of her garments besides). (The film is in color, but Julie’s wardrobe is mainly a matter of black and white.) But it is the indelible image of Julie in her sheer white wedding gown framed by the utterly, ominously black shadow of the church door that best discloses Truffaut’s intent and the reach of his argument. For we glean here, and from other consorting images already noted, the full context of Julie’s choice to ‘save herself’ for marriage: those traditional values, encapsulated in church doctrine, that dictate celibacy outside of marriage. It is this that Truffaut’s film passionately contests; for the insinuation of various forms of the image throughout the film cumulatively and ironically reveal that the ultimate cause of Julie’s grief—as it were, her canceled life—isn’t some blind fate executed by five reckless fools with a rifle but Julie herself and the guilt-generating traditional values she blindly adheres to. Guilt usually arises, of course, from deviating from these values and precepts; tragically, in Julie’s case, it arises from her failure to complete her adherence to them, and from her loss of her beloved and her consequent linkage of this loss—and of his loss—to her decision to adhere to them. Again, we must separate Julie’s perspective from Truffaut’s.

Truffaut sees Julie’s predicament as resulting from the kind of “transference of guilt”—from the carousers to herself—that operates in Hitchcock’s films. The ultimate source of this guilt is Catholicism or, more generally, Christianity, which predisposes one to guilt through such precepts as Original Sin. But at the same time Truffaut expands the concept in a Romantic, Renoirian direction, which provides a moral rather than religious dogmatic basis for understanding Julie’s predicament; for Julie’s tragedy is that, adhering to traditional values, she has curbed, in fact aborted, her natural inclination to give and receive love, at least sexually. By postponing sex with her beloved she has set herself against nature—her own human nature, and Nature, that is to say, the nature of cosmos. Obviously, Truffaut is locating himself at a point where Hitchcock and Renoir, his intellectual and spiritual mentors, converge. He is the artist-critic at that point; Julie is his heroine at that point—a victim of traditional, dogmatic morality which has led her away from all that is natural towards much that is unnatural: self-hate; suicide; murder.

Nor do I think this exhausts the speculative range of Truffaut’s argument. For, while Julie feels that she has been robbed of her husband and of the life only he could have given her, Truffaut feels instead, and his film implies, that, had the boy lived, his and Julie’s marriage would have been compromised and corrupted by the inhuman idealization that traditional ‘values’ impose on human relationships. Why? Had her bridegroom lived, Julie inevitably would have felt ‘tainted’ by sex inside marriage for having so strenuously, and disastrously, avoided it outside marriage; for such avoidance, however unconsciously, would have enforced on her marriage the equation of sexuality and corruption, killing it. Julie’s murderous criminality, then, projects this ‘taint,’ an unnerving capacity to engage reality sordidly—this, the result of her parochial religious upbringing. What other sense is to be made of her single suicide attempt? Why did she not try again? Why not kill one soul—herself—rather than five souls? Insatiable in her need for punishment to satisfy the demands of her guilt, Julie finds herself in the unwholesome grip of a value system so inundated with negative injunctions that the derailing of one condemnable act, her suicide, leads to the commission of another condemnable act, and then another, and another, and another, and another—and with each murder nicely rationalized as demonstrating her obedience to the claims of justice. It’s frightening to consider: Julie’s training as a daughter of Eve requires that all other virtues, including the simple one of not killing other people, must fall before the maintenance of unmarried virginity. Thus is Julie able perversely to kill again and again, since, besides extending the term of her self-inflicted punishment, this series of murders testifies to her Christian upbringing; for, by promising and withholding sex as prelude to each (except the last) of her kills, Julie can reconfirm what she (unconsciously) regards as the paramount female virtue. Truffaut’s film, with considerable force, gives us the dreary result of this mind-set, adding some tenderness, in the sense of soreness, to the analytical point by showing how gracefully Julie relates—as a ruse!—to the child of one of her intended victims. We are thus able to glimpse here the human potential in Julie that has been routed out by a convergence of forces. At the last she is more husk than human—but still a virgin.

Nothing so underscores the absurdity of Julie’s holding onto her virginity as the casting of so mature an actress in the role as Jeanne Moreau. Moreau a virgin? We know that’s not right. Moreau’s look of “experience,” no matter what the script insists, lends Julie an aura contrary to her alleged sexual innocence, and this in turn reflects on Julie’s unyielding celibacy with great, pointed and beautiful irony. Therefore, Moreau is right for the part even as—because—she seems all wrong for it.

Too, this odd casting links Julie to Moreau’s most glorious role, as Catherine in Jules and Jim, Truffaut’s most fully Renoirian film. A charming, vibrant, volatile bohemian in the first half of the twentieth century, Catherine seeks to re-create herself but discovers her emancipation must contend with die-hard male prerogatives. Dressed as a guy, she joins pals Jules and Jim for a spirited race through Parisian air—a lark to her playmates, but expressing the recognition of her equality that she longs for. Truffaut doesn’t disparage the men; he implies, instead, that if any two men could embrace independent, unruly Catherine as their equal it would be Jules and Jim. But telling of the projective fantasy to which even this progressive pair are susceptible is the fact that both first fell in love with Catherine because she reminded them of a favorite statue; and, so, from the start, despite their sincere atmospherics of gender equality, Catherine is the adored creature of their desire—and this she cannot bear. In time, she marries Jules and takes Jim as a lover. At the last, having instructed her spouse to watch, she drives off a cliff, with passenger Jim, into the sea, hoping to drown herself, along with her husband’s behavioral mirror-image, Jim, in her husband’s consciousness. Her primary motive is poignant: Catherine feels she must alert Jules that his liberated self-image blocks him from seeing how gender-insensitive he remains, because she herself sees no other way of improving the lot of their little daughter, Sabine; nor can Catherine otherwise resolve her feeling that, despite her own progressivism, she remains tied to a variation on the traditional domestic scheme from which she wants desperately to be liberated. Truffaut, then, is reflecting on his own time, the 1960s, when he thus rues the failure of gender relations to match their rhetoric of equality. This is the reason why, a half-dozen years hence, he added to Jules and Jim a coda: The Bride Wore Black—a plea for gender equality as antidote to the destructive acts and behavior that in its absence both men and women are driven to.

The film’s expert script is by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard; the masterful lensing, by Raoul Coutard. The roles of the victims are only lightly sketched (compare Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960, or Frenzy, 1972, where the opposite is the case); but Michel Bouquet and Charles Denner in particular shine.

As for Truffaut’s blatant identification with the most satyric of the victims, Denner’s artist whose hands-on “molding” of his model prefigures scenes that Truffaut himself would play in his L’enfant sauvage (1969) and La nuit américaine (1973), probably the less said the better.

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