La mariée était en noir
François Truffaut (1968)
Stylish, entertaining but silly, this is François Truffaut in homage-to-Hitchcock mode. As Penelope Houston pointed out in Sight and Sound (Autumn 1968), though, ‘Truffaut … is Renoir’s spiritual son, which can’t allow anything closer than a step-fatherly association with Hitchcock’. Even that may overstate the degree of connection between The Bride Wore Black and the film-maker to whom it bends the knee (though Houston’s review, the handout for this BFI screening, notes that Truffaut’s film is replete with Hitchcock visual references that went over my head). As with his previous picture, Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Truffaut engaged Bernard Herrmann to write the score. The music certainly evokes the cinema of Hitchcock but doesn’t mesh so well with what’s on the screen; the effect is to underline that The Bride Wore Black is Hitchcockian at (at least) one remove. A bigger problem is the lack of suspense. Within a few moments of her first appearance, it’s clear the title character, Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau), is a woman on a sinister mission; not much later, we know it’s a lethal one. A good chunk of the film’s 107 minutes is devoted to revealing Julie’s backstory and watching her work through her to do list.
That involves killing five men whom Julie deems jointly and equally responsible for the death of her husband David (Serge Rousseau) on their wedding day: as the couple came down the steps of the church where they’d just been married, a single gunshot killed the groom instantly. The five men, members of an informal hunting club, were together in an upstairs room in a building across the street from the church, mucking around with a loaded rifle. When the gun went off by mistake and the fatal shot hit, they hurried out of the building and went their separate ways. Julie tells one of the men on whom she takes revenge that ‘I tracked the five of you down, one by one’. It’s clear as mud how she goes about doing so: there’s no reference to a police investigation into David’s death or any suggestion that one or more of the culprits was named publicly.
Julie’s first victim is Bliss (Claude Rich). She gatecrashes his engagement party and pushes him off the balcony of his high-rise apartment before making her exit, unseen by the many party guests who can’t have failed to notice her entrance. The police don’t appear to investigate this fatal incident either. The third victim is Clément Morane (Michel Lonsdale); with his wife out of the house, Julie poses as the schoolteacher of Morane’s young son Cookie (Christophe Brunot). The little boy has only just gone to bed when Julie locks his father in the cupboard under the stairs. Before she seals the cupboard door with duct tape and Morane père suffocates, he makes a considerable racket to be let out; his son seemingly doesn’t hear. (The police do get involved with this murder but only by briefly arresting Cookie’s real teacher (Alexandra Stewart).) The fifth man on the list is the artist Fergus (Charles Denner), for whom Julie poses as Diana the Huntress. (She eventually shoots him with an arrow.) Corey (Jean-Claude Brialy) isn’t one of the infamous five but is a friend of both Bliss and Fergus. Moments before killing the former, Julie asks Corey to get her a glass of water, which she promptly empties into a hanging basket of African violets on Bliss’s balcony. When he sees Julie again at Fergus’s studio (the address is 13 Avenue de Némésis!), Corey fails to recognise her. Only when he’s back at home and happens to water some African violets, does the penny drop.
Truffaut doesn’t even offer a cod-psychology explanation for Corey’s inexplicable inability to place Julie as the highly conspicuous unexpected guest at his friend’s engagement celebration and the last person to be seen with Bliss before he fell to his death. Yet it’s not as if she’s a mistress of disguise. Despite the catchy title, she alternates between (chic) funeral weeds and bridal white outfits but she’s always unmistakably herself – that is, Jeanne Moreau. The cavalier storytelling, one of The Bride Wore Black’s most salient features, exposes the shallowness of the exercise and turns it into a backhanded compliment to the Master. The plot holes aren’t much of a tribute either to Cornell Woolrich, the American author of the 1940 novel (published under the pseudonym William Irish) on which the screenplay, by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, is based. The prolific Woolrich wrote the source material for numerous Hollywood and European films, including Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Truffaut’s later Mississippi Mermaid (1969). I don’t know Woolrich’s work but it seems safe to assume from the Wikipedia synopsis that The Bride Wore Black as a novel is very different from the film, and much more carefully put together. Truffaut and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard deliver some memorable visual highlights – the shocking velocity of Bliss’s death fall, the contrasting rhythm of the movement of Julie’s veil-like white scarf, which she asked him to retrieve from the balcony, as it takes its time floating downwards. All in all, though, the dominance of style over substance lends proceedings an increasingly artificial quality.
Still, the main actors are excellent (unlike their counterparts in a good few Hitchcock films), and enjoyable. Although Truffaut uses her chiefly as an image, Jeanne Moreau not only magnetises the camera; she also gives Julie more emotional variety than the role, as written, deserves. Michel Bouquet is Robert Coral, victim number two, whom Julie poisons in his shabby lodgings. Coral is an out and out loser but Bouquet (who’s now ninety-six – he appeared in a film as recently as 2020) gives a beautifully layered account of the character, blending humour and desperation to great effect. Coral can’t believe his luck when Julie appears to be romantically interested in him. A faint whiff of just desserts hangs around the murders of Bliss, Morane and Fergus, who all fancy themselves as ladykillers, but Coral’s death feels cruelly out of proportion to his attitudes and behaviour. Pompously self-approving Morane, a successful businessman and would-be politician, is a fine example of early Michel Lonsdale. The disjuncture between his amorphous, somewhat ungainly body and his expressive, incisive gestures is fascinating.
Fergus may be the fifth man on Julie’s list but he isn’t the last to die. When the rifle was fired, it was in the hands of Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), a dodgy car dealer. Julie, armed with a gun, arrives at his premises just too late to do the business: Delvaux is already being bundled into a police car as an irate customer hurls insults in his direction. After being arrested when she appears at Fergus’s funeral, Julie readily admits to killing him, Bliss, Coral and Morane but refuses to say why. She’s sent to jail and works in the kitchens there. She smuggles a large knife out before doing her meal trolley rounds – on both the women’s wing and the adjoining men’s wing, where the prisoners include Delvaux. As the trolley turns a corner, Truffaut’s camera stays behind in the corridor. The film ends with a male scream that segues into the organ chords of the Wedding March. This comes across not as bloodcurdling but as camp. It’s an apt conclusion to The Bride Wore Black.
27 February 2022
