The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Original title: La mariée était en noir

Warning: there will be some spoilers - if you really care in case of a film of this age, loosely based on a novel considerably older

A mysterious woman we eventually learn to be called Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) travels all over France to meet, charm and eventually kill a number of men. As it will turn out, these men are guilty parties in the shooting death of Julie’s husband right on the church steps directly after their wedding vows. These guys, one and all, are also what can only be called sexist pigs.

Though, in one of the more interesting moves François Truffaut’s adaptation of Cornel Woolrich’s novel makes, they are all very different kinds of sexist pigs, each and every one of them drawn in loving (?) detail and portrayed by a wonderful actor. Their avenger comes to these guys playing on each one’s specific weakness and neediness (as you know, there’s hardly anyone needier than a sexist pig). Like an avenging chameleon, she takes on exactly the role that will get her target’s trust, so she can eventually kill him in a very personal, close contact manner – Julie’s not a killer to look away from what she does.

But then, she is also one of those movie avengers who very much understands that what she does is wrong on various levels – certainly for her own existence as an independent being. Moreau’s portrayal of the emptiness inside of Julie – exactly the quality that makes it possible for her to become just the right woman for each murder – is chilling, as well as curiously touching. It does obviously help that her victims are all assholes in a way still all too recognizable in 2024, even without the somewhat accidental killing of her husband.

Formally, this is a very playful film. Truffaut uses the episodic structure of Julie going from murder to murder to create something akin to a series of connected short stories of differing tone held together by the presence of Moreau and a Bernard Hermann score. Hermann is particularly obvious a choice for the score because this is also one of those French films that bow at the altar of Hitchcock but can never quite achieve their idol’s way with suspense and tension. Being French films, after all, everyone in them is too much in love with talking cleverly, and everything’s happening at too leisurely a pace, not things that lend themselves to the creation of true suspense.

So it is often more the idea of suspense than the actual thing running through films like this; of course, a filmmaker like Truffaut is much to intelligent not to know what he’s doing or not doing in this regard, and so the Hitchcockian elements are all part of that  sense of playfulness, of the formal aspects of filmmaking being a formal game. This turns what could (perhaps should) be a weakness of the film into a strength.

It is not as if Truffaut can’t do conventional suspense when he wants to. In fact, The Bride Wore Black ends on a sequence that indeed is a perfect example of relatively straightforward suspense perfectly realized. Curiously, it also prefigures the beloved 2010s blockbuster trope of the villain of a film letting themselves be caught as integral part of their plans.

Looked at as a whole, there’s a fascinating duality to The Bride. Its formal playfulness, the sense of delight you get from it, the sense of beauty of many of the shots on paper do not fit the grimness of the actual tale being told (and embodied by Moreau’s unmoving face whenever she is not playing a role for one of her victims) here. There is a disquieting quality to the gap between form and content at the core of the film. This might very well be a conscious choice; if it is an accident of filmmaking, it is certainly one that provides The Bride Wore Black with a particular staying power for me.

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On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.