The François Truffaut season at the BFI in London remains a delightful event for me, irrespective of the fact that some of the director’s less well-known films turn out to be turkeys. Agreed: The Woman Next Door from 1981, starring Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant, is quite terrible. But deprived of travel, as we have been for so long, there in the darkness I hardly cared. The clothes, the houses, the restaurants: not since I was a moody teenager and obsessed with Françoise Sagan has la vie française seemed more bewitching.
Each film makes me think again about the way movies date (or not). While some age painfully fast – the scene in which Ardant finds herself in her underwear at a garden party, her dress having been ripped off in one fell swoop, is straight out of Benny Hill – others come into their own only late in life. When The Bride Wore Black was released in 1968, for instance, the critics disliked it. But in 2022, it reads rather well, at least for any women in the audience. Every time the vengeful widow played by Jeanne Moreau (in a startling monochrome wardrobe by Pierre Cardin) sets about killing another of the men responsible for the shooting of her husband on her wedding day, she must first endure not only their utter conviction that, yes, of course this beautiful woman only wants to sleep with them, but also their inevitably pompous monologues. Truffaut gave us mansplaining avant la lettre.
