A Major Disappointment

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

After watching the gripping Bride Wore Black I decided to take a look at the other credits of auteur co-writer (along with Jean-Loup Dabadie) /director François Truffaut.Reading reviews of Truffaut's other works,I spotted a title which appeared to mix sex Comedy with Film Noir!,which led to me getting ready to find out how gorgeous the girl is.The plot:Writing a thesis on female criminals, Stanislas Prévine learns about a prisoner called Camille Bliss,who is in jail for the murder of her dad,and her lover Arthur.Pushing the prison guard to give him a pass, Prévine starts holding a series of interviews with Bliss.Recording the interview so that he and his secretary can make a transcript of the minutes, Prévine begins to hear from Bliss about her wild lifestyle.As he goes deeper into Bliss's life, Prévine finds himself falling in love for her,and also starting to believe that Bliss has been wrongly imprisoned.View on the film:Kicking off Bliss's lifestyle with a young Bliss flying in the air,director François Truffaut, (who just a few weeks before filming had left a clinic after suffering from depression over his breakup with Catherine Deneuve) and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn let their hair down for a wild child,who leaps across the movie from the tie- dye colour opening to the bitter laughs of Prévine's final interview with Bliss.Placing Bliss and Prévine in Film Noir settings from a grime covered prison to lovers on the run roads, Truffaut & Pierre-William Glenn slide the Film Noir into raunchy sex Comedy.Whilst never feeling fully relaxed, Truffaut makes the genre mash-up a wonderful adventure,with superbly delivered tracking shots following Bliss life of crime being joined by sexy frolics,which includes a race car album being played during sex.Rolling out their adaptation of Henry Farrell's pulp novel with Bliss telling her life story in rapid-fire monologues,the screenplay by Truffaut and Dabadie playfully take on the unreliable Film Noir narrator,by keeping Bliss's narration in a straight line,whilst the flashbacks uncover a life of petty crime and risqué encounters with men and their wives.Spending most of the title in flashbacks,the writers cut terrific interjections into Bliss and Prévine's interviews,which reveal Prévine to be pulled towards an alluring femme fatale.Entering the movie in bottle cap glasses, André Dussollier gives a great performance as Stanislas Prévine,with Dussollier giving Prévine a real passion for Bliss,whilst making sure to keep him an outsider by putting Prévine in a neat dorky tie. Firing the monologues across the screen in a rapid-fire manner,the gorgeous Bernadette Lafont (who also appears topless) gives an excellent performance as Bliss,thanks to Lafont giving Bliss a hilarious sparkle over the unlucky men in her life,and also wrapping Bliss in a mysterious femme fatale shade,as Prévine discovers how dangerous a gorgeous girl can be.

The more films I watch with Bernadette Lafont, the more I appreciate her: of course she was an extremely sexy woman (here, she even looks good in a bug exterminator's uniform!), but beyond that she had a special wit and playfulness about her that set her apart from all others; probably only she could make the character she plays here fascinating and even endearing instead of repellent. Truffaut makes inventive use of flashbacks, and just when the film is beginning to feel a little repetitive, he starts springing a series of surprises on the viewer, leading up to an almost perfect ending. André Dussollier and Anne Kreis make very promising film debuts. *** out of 4.

Like Michael Winner, Truffaut thinks a feminist movie would be about a sexually promiscuous woman who turns the tables on a serious of idiotic men who are so caricatured that they bear little relation to the real oppressors facing women at this time, especially in institutionally misogynistic France. I should really like this film, it has everything I wanted - directed by the maker of my three desert-island films; magic realism; a Chinese-whispers narrative structure; bawdy comedy; grotesques; superb performances. Bernadette Lafont is sprightly in the lead role, escaping all the traps men lay for her (including her director). Andre Dussolier is sensational is his first role as the intellectual, spectacles-wearing professor who can't see beyond his own nose, and Guy Marchand is hilarious as a spectacularly vain rock star. All these things are good. The film isn't. Go figure.

This is one of the best French comedies that I have ever come across. Most of the humour here is pretty silly stuff, but somehow it works, thanks in large part to Lafont's outstanding performance. But what makes this film a truly great piece of work is the unforgettable ending, a finish that cements it as one of the best black comedies that you'll ever see.