La Mariée était en Noir (1967) - film review

At a party to celebrate his engagement, a young man named Bliss is drawn to a mysterious woman he has never seen before but who seems to know him.  Minutes later he is dead, having fallen from a top floor balcony.  Coral, a solitary middle-aged bachelor, is pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation to a concert by an unknown woman.  It proves to be a short-lived liaison.  Before he dies, the woman, Julie Kohler, tells Coral why she had to kill him.  On her wedding day, the man she cherished was shot dead on the church steps.  The man who fired the fatal bullet was one of five friends who were playing around with a rifle.  Today, Julie has only one reason for living – to track down and kill the five men who have ruined her life.  Two down, three to go...

In the mid-1950s, few film directors made a greater impression on the controversial young critics on the French film review paper Les Cahiers du cinéma than a certain Englishman who had made a name for himself in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock.  At the time, despite some notable box office successes, Hitchcock was not considered a serious filmmaker, and it was pretty well down to some of these French critics (Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut) that he was able to achieve the recognition he deserved in his lifetime.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when several of these same critics became filmmakers, they would attempt to emulate Hitchcock’s technique in their own films.  Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery (as the plagiarist said to the judge).

Of the French New Wave film directors, the most fervent admirer of Hitchcock’s work was François Truffaut.  La Mariée était en noir is Truffaut’s first and most obvious homage to Hitchcock, made almost immediately after he published his famous series of interviews with the great English filmmaker.  The film not only beautifully replicates Hitchcock’s cinematographic style (notably the skilful use of subjective shots and montage to build tension and suspense) but it also has something of his mischievously dark humour.  And if the music sounds more than vaguely Hitchcockian that is probably because it was composed by none other than Bernard Herrmann, the man who scored several of Hitchcock’s best films.   Of course, the film also bears Truffaut’s own very distinctive imprint, in its subtle eroticism, its intense depiction of uncontrollable passions and the references to the director’s own obsession with the female sex.

La Mariée était en noir is a stylish and entertaining work that combines suspense thriller and black comedy to great effect.  Jeanne Moreau (who featured in Truffaut’s earlier Jules and Jim), is superlative as the bordello-scented lady killer, probably her sexiest screen portrayal (and certainly her funniest).  The story is taken from a novel by William Irish, a writer who fascinated Truffaut and who would provide the subject for one of his later films, La Sirène du Mississippi.  Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (1954) was also based on one of Irish’s stories.

La Mariée était en noir is significant in that it marked the final collaboration of François Truffaut with his talented photography director, Raoul Coutard.  The two men parted on bad terms after a series of heated disagreements.  They had worked together since Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and Coutard deserves to receive as much credit for the look and popularity of Truffaut’s early films as the director himself.  Although it is somewhat less well regarded and less well-known than many of Truffaut’s film’s today, La Mariée était en noir was very well-received on its first release.  It is an enjoyable Hitchcockian concoction of "sex, murder and mayhem", laden with plenty of Nouvelle Vague sauce - in short, a cinephile’s delight.

© James Travers 2008

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