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Rating: Il_Paolo "E...state con me", n. 4.
Hello guys, it might seem unusual for me to talk to you about French cinema, and François Truffaut in particular, but my summer series doesn't necessarily have to revolve around "beach" movies, but rather offer you leisure opportunities, especially if you have nothing to do and enjoy lounging at home watching some films from the past, forgotten by most and therefore - indeed - "minor".
Nothing better, then, than this nice thriller ('83), the last film of a director who died relatively young, in what could have seemed the Summer of his life, before illness suddenly took him away at just over fifty, like a sudden August downpour.
To entice you to watch the film, it seems fitting to give a little preview of the plot: a man and his lover are killed under mysterious circumstances, and immediately the police begin to suspect the deceased's husband (J.L. Trintignant), evidently believing him to be jealous of his late wife. Hunted and believing he's close to being imprisoned, he goes into hiding with the help of the attractive secretary (F. Ardant) - who, of course, is in love with her boss - discovering, piece by piece and in a rather adventurous way, the reasons for the murders and the identity of the killer.
I say right away that the thriller - based on a novella by C. Williams - is enjoyable and supported by a good rhythm, without excessive violence and overwhelming tensions, thus relaxing the viewer, rather than unsettling or scaring them as one might expect from much of the genre's cinema.
But, as important and useful as it is to relax and enjoy an hour and a half of cinema, the plot is not everything in Truffaut's films, which I like to appreciate also from a formal and stylistic perspective, for once.
The film - certainly light, almost a divertissement compared to "Day for Night" or "The Story of Adele H." - stands out first and foremost as a homage from the director to the noir cinema of the '40s and '50s, made evident by the use of a well-controlled black and white that increases the overall expressiveness of the mise-en-scène, from the locations, to the interiors, to the faces of the various characters, often cut by interesting plays of light that, enlightening the faces and especially the glances, seem almost to carve out the centrality of the person in relation to the context, and the mystery that is the driving force of the plot; at the same time, we cannot forget how the film also aims to be a homage to one of Truffaut's main masters and inspirations - Alfred Hitchcock - not only for the genre treated but also for the stylistic influence of the originally English director who passed away a few years earlier: the aspect is visible considering the setting, the very tone of the narration, where the certainties and the petty bourgeois hypocrisies of the protagonist's physical and mental places are gradually crumbled, forcing him into adventure, escape and the unusual, but also the underlying irony with which all the characters, especially the secretary, are treated, in their sentimental minuet, in their being clumsy and unprepared for the events, almost as in the classics with Grace Kelly, James Stewart or Cary Grant.
There remains - with the hindsight of the viewer - a certain melancholy in watching this film, knowing that it is Truffaut's "testament": almost as if the director, before leaving, had "finally" wanted to leave us with a lesson of lightness and good humor, linking the breath of a pink thriller like this to the breath of life and its emotions itself.
What personally makes me think the most, with an undertone of sadness, are the very last shots of the film, where the lens of a camera, accidentally fallen to the ground, becomes the object of play for a group of children: with their white socks - a symbol of a certain childlike purity - and their patent leather shoes, they dribble the symbol of cinema, almost suggesting that the representation of life, but also life itself, can be conceived in their fullness only with a childlike gaze, and with the naivety of those who never tire of experimenting with the new, the different, the mystery.
Yours again,
Il_Paolo
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