The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Director: François Truffaut                              Writer: François Truffaut & Jean-Louis Richard
Film Score: Bernard Herrmann                        Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy and Charles Denver

This is François Truffaut’s attempt at film noir, and he couldn't have chosen a better subject than a novel by Cornell Woolrich. The Bride Wore Black doesn’t quite have that forties touch, being set in the modern 1960s and photographed in color, but it does benefit from Truffaut’s directorial genius and a brilliant score by Bernard Herrmann. Even the titles of the film are amazing. They are shown over the printing of a painting of a woman, nude from the waist up, being churned out over and over on a printing press. This symbolizes the way that Jean Moreau changes herself every time she meets one of her quarry, a repetition of herself in order to achieve her goal. And over it all is Herrmann’s beautiful score--one that eerily brings to mind his work for Hitchcock--playing a heavy, slightly dissonant version of Mendelsohn’s wedding march.

The story begins with Moreau asking for a man, Claude Rich, at his apartment. He’s not there, but the next day she crashes his engagement party, lures him out onto the balcony and pushes him off. After that she takes an airplane and flies into another city, this time visiting a poor and lonely man, Michel Bouquet, and giving him a ticket to a classical concert. He goes, meets her, and she comes up to his apartment the next night, poisoning a bottle of wine and killing him. But before both men die she tells them her name, Julie Kohler, and they clearly recognize her. It’s not until the third murder, Michael Lonsdale, that we learn the story of why she's doing this. On her wedding day, when she came out of the church with her husband, he was shot and killed on the steps of the church. It turns out five men in the apartment across the street shot him by accident and then left the scene. She found out who they were and has been hunting them down one by one.

Jeanne Moreau makes an interesting killer with sad, lifeless eyes. In the beginning of the film she tries to jump out of a window and commit suicide, but her mother prevents her. The revenge is the only thing that keeps her going. Each of the “victims” is well cast and is believable. The biggest fallacy, in terms of critical interpretation of the film, is that it is somehow attempting to be an homage to Hitchcock. It’s not. There is no suspense in the film at all. We know she’s hunting down these men, the only thing we don’t know is why. She choses a different method each time, and that is interesting, but there appears to be no concern by her that she’ll get caught. And while it typically is called noir, I don't really think it was an attempt at that, either.

The film is very French, very New Wave, similar in many ways to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. There is a decided lack of visible emotion by the protagonist, and the same sense of not caring if she’s caught. There’s also a complete lack of moral underpinning. In fact, she goes into a church to confession and tells the priest what she’s doing, but his protestations make her even more determined to carry out her plan. Some have criticized Bernard Herrmann’s score because its emotionalism seems to clash with the images onscreen, but in the end I think that’s really the point. Like Bresson, Truffaut is subverting expectations, following not traditional film language but molding the story to the new conventions he helped pioneer ten years earlier. The Bride Wore Black is not a great film in the American sense, but it is a great film in the artistic sense. It is compelling to watch on its own terms, not in comparison to other films, and that is the true sign of art.