France comedy
1983
bw 111 min.
Director: Francois Truffaut
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1339L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
If, as Truffaut said,
quoting Renoir back in 1958, "The film director's task consists of getting
pretty women to do pretty things," then never did he apply himself more
faithfully than in Confidentially Yours specifically for Fanny Ardant,
not only to showcase her considerable beauty but to allow her to demonstrate
her talent for comedy after the intensity of The Woman Next Door.
Truffaut always enjoys showing active, dominant women in contrast to the
vulnerable, fragile male and Ardant's role parallels that of Catherine Deneuve
in The Last Metro. Ardant plays a secretary in love with her boss,
Jean-Louis Trintignant, and the role is enhanced to allow her, and not her
boss, to conduct the investigation while he lies hiding in the cellar,
consoling himself à la Bertrand Morane with staring at the legs of the women
who walk past his basement window. The film also marks Truffaut's return to his
beloved black and white, which certainly serves to heighten the beauty of
Ardant, and is also in keeping with the noir genre.Indeed, there are few
tasks harder for a French director than to produce a convincing French version
of an American thriller. The American serie noire has its own specific
conventions that transfer badly or not at all to the French context.
Confidentially Yours solves the problem of the transposition to a French
setting by creating a cinematic universe from which almost all allusions to an
external geographical reality are rigorously excluded. There is no sense of
place: anonymous locations -- nightclubs, hotel lobbies, a cinema foyer --
could be anywhere on the French Riviera but by shooting largely at night -- or
at least "day for night" -- and in pouring rain, the sense of anonymity is
enhanced. So we may be in the world of the American-style thriller but it is a
world from which everything specifically American has been eliminated.
In any
event, the setting is of no importance. Its artificiality at times borders on
the abstract. Nor is the unraveling of the plot, the police investigation, of
any interest to Truffaut. What does excite him is the creation of a world of
marvelous comic invention and artifice out of nothing. His pleasure lies in
Hitchcock-style manipulation, pulling the strings of his creations for the
sheer pleasure of propelling them into each other's arms. His achievement is
simultaneously getting us to stand outside the crime thriller convention and to
share his pleasure as he mocks it with a nudge and a wink. Truffaut repeats
this gesture in the succession of homages to the crime thriller in general, the
1940s gangster film, the American comedy, and a series of quotations from
Renoir, Hitchcock, Resnais, and Truffaut himself. Cinephiles have fun but so
too do the uninitiated, unaware of most of the allusions, but accepting them as
original gags integrated into the fabric of the film.
Truffaut speaks
elsewhere of the way little-known writers of crime fiction often reveal
themselves in intimate detail through their writing, secure in the illusion
that they remain anonymous behind the corpses and shootings with which their
plots are littered. Likewise Truffaut, thinly concealed behind the tortuous
plot of Confidentially Yours, reveals his own tenderness, his relish for
the intimate details of human behavior, his pleasure in setting his characters
one against the other and also in bringing them together again, and his
delicacy and delight in filming the vulnerability and also the beauty of women.
No longer does he need to appear in his films in the g se of Jean-Pierre Lˇaud.
He is present throughout Confidentially Yours and his presence, his
sense of freedom, his complicity with the audience, and his joie de
vivre pervade the film.
Finally Sunday!, the British title of
Confidentially Yours, is a grimly appropriate title for Truffaut's last
film since it was on a Sunday -- October 21, 1984 -- that he died. In his
films, however, Truffaut deliberately underplays the drama and the solemnity of
death. He confronted his own death in a similar fashion, mocking the idea of
his indispensability or that of any man. But he leaves an enormous gap, one
that is difficult to fill or conceal. Truffaut lives in the memories of those
who knew him, and more permanently perhaps, through his films. With his death
an arbitrary finality is imposed on his work, arbitrary but indisputable. For
Fran¨ois Truffaut, the battle between the provisional and the definitive is
finally over, and all is now definitive.
-- Don Allen
(Excerpted from his
book, Finally Truffaut: A Film-by-film Guide to the Master Filmmaker's
Legacy)
CREDITS
Directed by Fran¨ois Truffaut
Script and Dialogue
by Fran¨ois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Aurel
From the novelThe
Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams
Director of Photography: Nestor
Almendros
Art Director: Hilton McConnico
Sound by Pierre Gamet and
Jacques Maumont
Caroline Sihol
Edited by Martine Barraque
Music by
Georges Delerue
TRANSFER
This new digital transfer of
Confidentially Yours was made from a 35mm black-and-white fine-grain
master and 35mm magnetic master soundtrack, in its original European theatrical
aspect ration of 1.75:1.