Review: François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray

François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black exudes a gripping aura of willed chilliness. One doesn’t have to be familiar with other characteristically warmer Truffaut films to sense this element of experimental contrivance. Something’s just always a little off, and it’s most explicitly signaled by the contrast between the images and Bernard Herrmann’s deep, resonant score, which, for the Alfred Hitchcock devotee, will be almost distractingly reminiscent of the music that the great composer provided for Vertigo.

Herrmann’s sound immediately suggests Hitchcock, but the images don’t exhibit the suspense master’s exactitude for blocking. Hitchcock’s images have an obsessive locked-in-place quality, with his characters often suggesting flies pinned to beautiful, unnerving compositions. Truffaut favors looseness of movement, and though he downplays this tendency in The Bride Wore Black, it nevertheless remains, and that looseness clashes with the music. It feels as if we’re seeing one movie and hearing another.

The camera pirouettes of this film are often so superfluous as to foster assumptions that they’re jokes—and maybe they are. Subjective tracking shots, from the point of view of Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau), the wronged bride murdering her way through the morons who accidentally killed her husband on their wedding day, often appear to be in the film for the sake of it. These shots don’t carry the charge of the camera movements from Vertigo and Psycho that clearly inspired them. They’re flourishes, nearly playful, and freeing: They might precede a murder, but the movements, in themselves, connote grace and unfettered transportation—a theme commonplace to Truffaut’s art that’s considerably more unusual in the work of Hitchcock.

Truffaut and cinematographer Raoul Coutard achieve eerier effects when they’re working on their own aesthetic terms. There’s an image early in The Bride Wore Black that’s bone-chilling. Julie is staking out her first victim, a pampered ladies’ man named Bliss (Claude Rich), at his pre-wedding party, and we see her in the far right background of the frame while the groom and a friend discuss her from the vantage point of the left foreground. The men are ostensibly the subject of the shot, as it’s their conversation that’s setting up the scene’s punchline, but our eyes fixate on Julie’s own obvious fixation. She’s a ghost, a wraith who appears to be nearly translucent in her white gown (Julie will wear only variations of white and black throughout Truffaut’s film—a playfully blunt symbol of hatred poisoning optimism), and we know that these hounds are about to meddle in forces far beyond their understanding.

That’s what The Bride Wore Black really is: a ghost story of a woman living out a chameleonic cycle of death that’s forced upon her by oblivious male blowhards. Like many of Hitchcock’s late thrillers, this film is concerned with the tension between the genders, but Truffaut’s emphasis is markedly, sometimes self-consciously different. In Hitchcock’s films, the woman is an “other” that’s often regarded with longing, as well as with resentment of the powers that inspired the longing. Psycho is startling for how little authorial sympathy it extends toward Marion Crane, a woman who’s destroyed by various contradicting and hypocritical male forces. Truffaut is more politically correct: Our sympathies steadfastly belong to Julie, despite, or perhaps because of, Moreau’s bold inscrutability in the role. With one poignant semi-exception, the men are explicitly understood to be pigs who see women as conquests to be made while living up a bourgeoisie high life that divorces them from the pain they mindlessly wreak.

Truffaut’s sensibility might be, superficially at least, better socially adjusted, but it’s also a little pat in the context of The Bride Wore Black. Each of the five men who wronged Julie embody various, though barely differentiated, modes of insidious male manipulation: cocksure playfulness, entitlement, self-pity, passive-aggression, and so on. This narrative gambit is meant to tether the viewer to Julie’s plight, but plays mostly—again, with one semi-exception—as a fussily symbolic version of a typically dehumanizing revenge film trope.

Hitchcock’s view of the sexes might be uncomfortable, but it springs from an intensity of unprocessed emotion. There’s a sense of chaos and torment in his films that feels personal, and that speaks vividly to the differences between men and women that have been indoctrinated socially. Truffaut has no issue with drinking Moreau in with his camera, particularly her buttocks and legs (as in a sequence that cheekily finds her dressed as Diana the Huntress), but this objectification is couched in an evasive theme that excuses such proclivities by making a point of ruing objectification. Hitchcock was less resolved, but more direct, about his fetishes.

There’s always been something a little forcibly gallant in the way that Truffaut often reduces men to boobs, particularly in his Doinel films. Women are also “others” in his films, but they’re filtered through a scrim of perception that’s theoretically more positive than Hitchcock’s. Women are agents of freedom for Truffaut who challenge the smug privilege of men, which is to say that women destroy men in his films as well, but these destructions are offered as celebrations rather than as the tragedies that pervade in Hitchcock’s films.

Truffaut is a great artist and critic, but his work is too often thought of in simply “humanistic” terms that trivialize it by eliding the fact that he was also a director with contradictory sexual-political obsessions (his compassion is tinged with a sense of pandering distance that could be taken as patronizing). That preoccupation, at its basest, is Truffaut’s great commonality with Hitchcock. As a film, The Bride Wore Black is a beautiful, macabre art object that’s slightly dead inside, a thematically neat battle-of-the-sexes thriller that plays as a fusion of Jules and Jim and Vertigo. But it’s a fascinating starting point for discussions of Truffaut and Hitchcock, and of the affinity of sensibility that might have enabled them to create their 1967 book-length interview.

Image/Sound

The image on this Blu-ray of The Bride Wore Black is slightly soft in some of the wider exterior shots but is otherwise sharp and highly detailed. The color grading leans into the sun-dappled naturalism of the film, except for the vibrant reds that strategically pop in the frame from time to time. The black levels are nice and deep, while the grain is tight and even, giving the transfer an alluringly film-like texture. The well-balanced audio presentation supplies clean dialogue exchanges and dutifully emphasizes the gravitas of Bernard Hermann’s score.

Extras

The audio commentary by Julie Kirgo, Steven C. Smith, and Nick Redman is engagingly detailed and conversational. The historians make a good case for the film’s spontaneity and humanity, and fascinatingly map out the many creative disagreements that marred the production, most notably between director François Truffaut, cinematographer Raoul Cotard, and Herrmann. Nothing else is included aside from a handful of trailers for Kino Lorber releases.

Overall

Kino has outfitted their release of François Truffaut’s most overt homage to Alfred Hitchcock with a solid transfer and a fun, informative audio commentary.