Vivement Dimanche!
François Truffaut (1983)
I doubt there are many good films with an exclamation mark in the title. Anyway, this isn’t one of them. (The awkward English title reads like a translation: the picture was released in the US as Confidentially Yours.) Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumour in the year that Finally, Sunday! was released and he died in the following year. For a while, I felt guilty disliking the film because it was the last one he completed. By the end, it had become so annoying that irritation had eclipsed guilt. The film certainly moves quickly and fluently but to like it you need not only to love the crime thriller genre and Hitchcock’s work in particular but also to want nothing more from two hours in the cinema than spotting references to other movies and chuckling at familiar crime-caper machinery. (The source material is an American novel, The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams. Truffaut did the adaptation with Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel.)
Finally, Sunday! is the story of how Barbara Becker, after losing her job as secretary to estate agent Julien Vercel, turns private investigator to try and prove him innocent of the murders for which he’s suspected. The basic plot obviously has some connection to The Wrong Man, The 39 Steps and others in the Hitchcock canon. (The couple’s bickering before they fall in love also recalls the Robert Donat-Madeleine Carroll routines in The 39 Steps.) The boss-secretary relationship is a reminder of Psycho and there’s a scene of Barbara driving alone – in the dark, in lashing rain – that evokes Marion Crane on the way to Bates Motel. Barbara is a brunette: her disappointment that Vercel prefers blondes must be a nod to Hitchcock’s own preferences. But neither The 39 Steps nor Psycho (I’ve not seen The Wrong Man) has the self-consciousness of Finally, Sunday! This is a relentlessly sprightly jeu d’esprit and a mostly empty exercise in style. (The sleek black-and-white photography is by Nestor Almendros.)
The film’s first two sequences may also be its best. Fanny Ardant as Barbara makes a great entrance, as we see her walking down the street of the provincial French town where the story is set, giving an amiable brush-off to a young man who likes the look of her. Truffaut then cuts to Jean-Louis Trintignant, as Vercel, out shooting wild birds from across a lake. The death of one of the other shooters there, in which Vercel appears to be implicated, is staged expertly and startlingly. The partnership between Ardant and Trintignant works well enough throughout – there’s a good connection between them, although she is very self-aware. Ardant is tall and has an intrepid spirit (she’s like a less eccentric Geena Davis). She moves with such exuberance that she’s almost intimidating. At one point, Barbara is in costume, a tunic and high boots, for rehearsals of an amateur production of a Victor Hugo play, and Ardant looks great in this outfit. (It made me realise the principal boy quality in her movement.) Trintignant’s shifty, ratty look is invaluable. His Vercel, in hiding at the back of his office, is always witty but rarely likeable: it would come as no surprise if he turned out to be guilty of the murders he’s wanted for, and he keeps us (and Barbara) wondering. Trintignant’s shrunken quality makes you wonder if Vercel’s body is caving in under the weight of a guilty conscience.
There’s a happy, matrimonial ending. One of the last and one of the few genuinely playful images is of the feet of children in the church choir kicking about the camera cap dropped by the wedding photographer. But even this sequence’s charm is too underlined by the music on the soundtrack. (Georges Delerue’s score is perfect for Truffaut’s purposes, hardly a compliment.) The film was being shown at BFI in conjunction with the ‘Jacques Audiard and the French crime thriller’ season but it has a kind of civilised jocoseness that I’m relieved not to have noticed in any of the Audiard films I’ve so far seen. Finally, Sunday! is so deliberately light-hearted that it’s oppressive.
28 January 2010
