Boring Your Enemies to Death

François Truffaut screws around with tone so much in The Bride Wore Black (1968) that we’re alienated from the characters, and all there is to do is sit back and observe the revenge roundelay dispassionately while Jeanne Moreau knocks off the hapless, shallow men who mistakenly shot and killed her husband. I get the feeling that Truffaut was trying to replicate his own earlier triumphs with random narrative twists and disjunctive edits (as
in Jules and Jim and

Back in black. Moreau and Brialy

Shoot the Piano Player) or try his hand at Godardian displacement in a Hitchcock-like suspense thriller. But Hitchcock was never this blasé. Whatever Truffaut thought he was doing, he apparently didn’t have much feeling for human beings and emotions anymore or even how to generate a sustained arc of suspense. What happened to the director who showed such love and exuberance for the bohemian trio in Jules and Jim (also starring Moreau, gloriously) or for the neglected Antoine falling through Parisian society’s postwar cracks in The 400 Blows? 

In The Bride Wore Black (adapted from the Cornell Woolrich noir novel), a pulp sensibility prevails, but the director’s distancing techniques — heavy symbolism (black scarves blown about by the wind, the murderess posing as Diana, the goddess of the hunt), jump-cutting, bright lighting, and what can only be called Brechtian staging — kill most of the suspense. Moreau is monotonous (even her wig seems to be unnaturally weighing down her forehead) when she should seem driven by unhinged passion. Her victims all behave like oafs with stereotypically French male swagger, so we don’t feel any of the terror in their dispatching. The effect is a bewildering brew of overt cruelty and slapstick. With the exception of the first murder victim, pushed to his death off a balcony, most of the shocks are completely predictable because the setups are dragged out interminably; in the end, the movie feels like an affectless chore. A thriller black comedy that deadens one’s responses is a contradiction in terms.

Out of Italy

The celebrated partnership of Vittorio De Sica, an actor who became one of Italy’s—and the West’s—most revered directors, and Cesare Zavattini, a screenwriter and film theorist, was inaugurated in the movies with the luminous The Children Are Watching Us in 1944, although the two knew each other for more than a decade prior. Together, their collaborations of Italian neorealism were more mystical and allegorical than the harsher social portraits of corruption and decay in the work of other Italian neorealists like Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. The De Sica-Zavattini films are smaller-scale studies in frailty and innocence; instead of making Grand Statements about politics and society, they paint individuals in unselfconscious but lyrical strokes—prose poetry character studies. If, years after viewing, we’ve forgotten the scenes of wartorn Rome and its political infighting in Rossellini, we probably still remember the disillusioned faces in De Sica.

Zavattini’s realism is an homage to the nineteenth century Russian novelists, particularly Turgenev and Tolstoy. (Jean Renoir paid tribute to the Russian and French realists in much the same way.) De Sica, a great director, uses actors’ faces and classic narrative conventions like linearity and situational irony to tell stories of the bereft—losers, dreamers, and children enduring the cold hopelessness of life on the skids. He hits his mark, too. The emotional impact of these movies wells up like a rising tide, evenly and surely. In the final scene of The Children Are Watching Us, the camera fixes on the back of the abandoned child as he trudges away, and the indictment of all squabbling, selfish, vain adults is complete.

Scenes from childhood. Luciano De Ambrosis

The De Sica-Zavattini collaboration produced about twenty films, including the hallowed masterpieces Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us isn’t quite one of the masterpieces, but its incandescence and Petrarchan sweetness can’t be shaken off easily. It points the way to the fables of childhood in Truffaut, the Taviani brothers, and Shunji Iwai.