Saw Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK yesterday, a clear homage to Hitchcock in many ways but without any of the visual precision or flair one would normally expect of either filmmaker. I’m puzzled by this film. It’s a very enjoyable watch — according to Truffaut, an exercise in plot based on a novel by Cornell Woollrich — and it definitely works on that level. Plus, there’s Jeanne Moreau, impassive and beautiful, floating around the film killing men in a series of modish Pierre Cardin dresses – only in black or white or a combination thereof, as if wearing that moment of transition from bride to widow, from hope to despair. She’s the bride whose husband was killed on the steps of the church minutes after their marriage. Those responsible are a bunch of bored laddish middle-class messieurs out drinking, having fun and playing irresponsibly with guns. The shooting was an accident. But they’re going to pay. She sees her life as forever ruined, is out to kill each and every one of them – and does. Someone might make a case for the film being feminist. Truffaut himself does, tentatively, in one of the extras in the blu-ray . The film definitely ‘sides’ with the Jeanne Moreau character. All the men are on the make, even at their own engagement parties. They each objectify and try to make out with the widow – who has no compulsions telling them how boorish they are before killing them. But the film seems to revel more in the men’s attempts at seduction – it’s so at one with a particular playboy ideology of the time, at least a French variant – that it fails to convey the moral urgency in Moreau’s actions much less the fun in her revenge. For a Hitchcock homage favouring plot, it’s a film curiously lacking in suspense. Bernard Herrman did the score. Truffaut argued with Raould Coutard about the cinematography and use of colour, and one only has to see the film to see why they would; it’s at best unremarkable (and I dislike all those zooms, no less annoying for then being so characteristic). It was critically panned but a big success on its initial release, and both are perfectly understandable now. What isn’t is the current critical elevation.
