Re: The Bride Wore Black (1968)
Posted: September 27th, 2009, 12:20 pm
Start with everything written above (after you've seen it) and we'll continue on from there.
How I hate whe this happens to me...and it always happens while writing long posts...I usually lose them completely....Oh well.
What was I writing?....Train of thought were are you???
Well I was praising the intelligent, well-written, thourough reviews by everybody and saying that it was difficult to add anything else.
I bough the DVD edition of the film last Friday.
I watched it on Saturday morning and I felt that knowing beforehand the plot ruined it a little bit for me, especially since I thought that the film started with the murder of Julie's bridegroom and this is something that the viewer discovers way into the picture, not knowing during the first half and hour -at least- Julie's motives. In any case I enjoyed watching Truffaut's clever film.
Jeanne Moreau's performance is pivotal to the success of the film. Her detached way of portraying Julie, apparently cold, zombie-like, mechanic, devoid of emotions....when in fact she was robbed of the single most important human emotion -LOVE-....her reason to live... being driven by the hatred for the ones who were responsible of it...It's a very complex performance, full of layers.
The Hitchcoknian homage is apparent everywhere during the film, including the great score. The Hitchcock film that most came to my mind while watching TBWB is "Vertigo" with its theme of living among the dead or dead people coming back to life, a fascinating subject.
But Truffaut did not only borrow from Hitchcock...The scene in which Jean-Claude Brialy finally discovers where he first saw Julie, while pouring water onto a plant is incredibly reminiscent of the scene from Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" (1932) in which Edward Everett Horton's -thanks to an ashtray in the shape of a Gondola, correct me if I'm wrong- discovers where he first saw Herbert Marshall...