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The transposition of Cornell Woolrich has its charms, not the least of which is a certain Robbe-Grillet intimation in the title (Le Voyeur). Not New Orleans but Réunion Island, where the tobacco plantation scion (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is an aging bachelor turning to personal ads. The blonde off the ship (Catherine Deneuve) bears no resemblance to the brunette he's been corresponding with, her visage adorns his company's cigarette packs soon after the whirlwind marriage. "Adorable," meaning "worthy of adoration," a quality undiminished even when the siren absconds with his fortune, a breakdown brings him to the France he had studiously avoided. "Before I met you, I thought life was so simple... You mixed everything up," François Truffaut the analytical masochist wouldn't want it any other way. The Phoenix Nightclub flickers on a TV screen in the Antibes hospital, the impostor lives in a seedy hotel climbed like a castle tower by the wronged husband. The heroine suffocates in the dark and carries a past of reformatories and pimps, she's also Deneuve, her beauty rhapsodized about in front of a shimmering fireplace. "Even if it all has to end badly, I am delighted to have known you." On the lam in a red convertible, the Psycho investigation comes complete with a murdered detective (Michel Bouquet) tumbling down the staircase. Truffaut's principal tributary is not Hitchcock but Renoir, though, opening with a clip from La Marseillaise and pockmarking the gloss on La Chienne with fleeting evocations of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Arizona Jim plays at the local theater) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (wishing tree in front of the colonial mansion). Poison and comic-strips complete the ode to love, "is it always so painful?" One last reference for the road, La Grande Illusion amid Swiss snows that blur romance and oblivion. With Nelly Borgeaud, Martine Ferrière, and Marcel Berbert.
--- Fernando F. Croce |