CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS Movie Review

Vivement Dimanche!
Finally, Sunday

François Truffaut's final film—a larky pastiche of gumshoe noir and Hitchcock homage about a trench-coated secretary determined to clear her boss of suspicion by tracking down a murderer—hardly feels like a summing up of the great director's career. Confidentially Yours (Vivement Dimanche) feels tired and rote, and neither the crisp black-and-white images of Nestor Almendros nor the lilting melodies of Georges Delerue can keep us from drifting off to reflect back on other, deeper pleasures that Truffaut has given us. Yet if Confidentially Yours leaves us with a surprising number of aftershocks, it surely is due to the presence of its star, Fanny Ardant. Truffaut's love for so many of his leading ladies was legendary, and there's something reassuringly moving in his last film being so obviously a love letter to its star. The director Truffaut “played” in Day for Night assures Jean-Pierre Léaud in that film that the cinema is what is important to the two of them—that they are not like other people. But in so many of his films, from the Antoine and Colette episode of Love at Twenty (Marie-France Pisier) through Jules and Jim (Jeanne Moreau), Mississippi Mermaid (Catherine Deneuve), The Story of Adele H. (Isabelle Adjani), and The Woman Next Door (Fanny Ardant), women are the irresistible, inexplicable force that generate the gravitational pull of his storytelling. (His The Man Who Loved Women is only one more example, despite the fact that the miracle of the director's attraction to all women was the film's very subject.) Some have expressed disappointment that Truffaut didn't give us something more overtly “profound” as his last statement; but what could be purer, more consistent, and more honestly profound than his last gaze being fixed on a woman he loved, showing her off to us proudly, asking us with his last breath: “Isn't she something?” Confidentially, Mr. Truffaut, you were something too.

NEXT STOP… Stolen Kisses, The Bride Wore Black, Gumshoe

1983 (PG) 110m/B FR Fanny Ardant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Philippe Lauden-bach, Caroline Sihol; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Aurel; C: Nestor Almendros; M: Georges Delerue. VHS, LV FOX, HMV