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La vérité



Beautiful, troubled Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) came to bohemian Paris to escape the suffocation of provincial life, only to wind up in a courtroom, accused of a terrible crime: the murder of her lover (Sami Frey). As the trial commences and the lawyers begin tangling over Dominique's fate, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Oscar-nominated La vérité delves into her past, reconstructing her struggle to find a foothold in the city. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of an impulsive young woman misunderstood and mistreated by those around her, and of her ultimately tragic affair with an up-and-coming conductor. With an astonishing performance by Bardot, Clouzot's affecting and intricately constructed film—a huge late-career success for the French master—renders a harsh verdict against a hypocritical and moralistic society.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Le scandale Clouzot, a sixty-minute documentary from 2017 on director Henri-Georges Clouzot
• Interview from 1960 with Clouzot
• Interview with actor Brigitte Bardot from the 1982 documentary Brigitte Bardot telle qu'elle
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau

As the Criterion description alludes to, France chose this over À bout de souffle for their Oscar submission in 1960! Will have to get around to watching my copy to see if it's worth the upgrade, but Clouzot is having a banner run here lately of getting his filmography out on English-friendly Blu-rays

It did get nominated in the end, so I doubt France was having sec nd thoughts. But I'd love to see Goddard get nominated for an oscar

Unbelievably the Academy snubbed the next year's submission, L'année dernière à Marienbad! Pierrot le fou was the only Godard film to be submitted for the French foreign film submission and the Oscars passed it over in favor of three films most of us have heard of (Kwaidan, the Shop on Main Street, and Marriage Italian Style) and two head-scratchers (Käre John, starring Jarl Kulle from all the Bergman comedies and better known in the states at the time for its depictions of eroticism; and Blood on the Land, a Greek submission which I must confess I've never heard of at all)

Of course, La vérité lost the Oscar to the Virgin Spring

It's a good film, but I recall placing it near the bottom of Clouzot's filmography. Manon, Les espions and La prisonnière would have all been more pressing gaps to fill if I had my way.

Maybe it's in the doc, but I'm surprised there's not more about the film's troubled production, practically a dry run for L'enfer, which culminated in Bardot's suicide attempt and was instrumental in the film making the splash it did at the time.

Cold Bishop wrote: Fri Nov 16, 2018 3:57 am La prisonnière would have all been more pressing gaps to fill if I had my way.

Out in the UK on Blu-ray from StudioCanal, FYI

I'm aware, but I'm speaking Region 1. Although, the film really should have been released here around the buzz for the Inferno doc, since it's largely interesting as a salvage job and extension of the earlier film's optic-art experiments.

Nice news. I was just going through his filmography, but have still to watch the final three films. Miquette is by far his worst film. It's really embarrassing. Also, apart from the exceptional final 10-15 minutes, Manon was a drag. Other than that, his films have kept a very high standard. Wages of Fear is still one of my all time favorite thrillers. Quai des Orfèvres has got to be my favorite of his outside of Wages. Always found Diabolique a little too overwritten, although it of course has loads of amazing scenes. Le corbeau has not aged well, I thought.

jegharfangetmigenmyg wrote: Fri Nov 16, 2018 6:40 am Nice news. I was just going through his filmography, but have still to watch the final three films. Miquette is by far his worst film. It's really embarrassing. Also, apart from the exceptional final 10-15 minutes, Manon was a drag. Other than that, his films have kept a very high standard. Wages of Fear is still one of my all time favorite thrillers. Quai des Orfèvres has got to be my favorite of his outside of Wages. Always found Diabolique a little too overwritten, although it of course has loads of amazing scenes. Le corbeau has not aged well, I thought.

I think Le Corbeau is more relevant & prescient than ever, when considering the social media smear campaigns and Twitter 'lynch-mobbing' in recent years.

A shaming of an antiquated keyboard warrior if you will.

Bardot is a young girl on trial for murdering her ex-lover, and the question is whether it was a crime of passion or not. A competent courtroom piece, intertwined with flashbacks of life of these young people in contemporary France. Some scenes are good, but the romance depicted fails to attain any gravitas, and the courtroom framing isn’t strong enough to make this more than a mixed result.

By far Bardot's best movie and one of Clouzot's very best. Straight 10/10!

olmo wrote: Fri Nov 16, 2018 7:47 am

jegharfangetmigenmyg wrote: Fri Nov 16, 2018 6:40 am Nice news. I was just going through his filmography, but have still to watch the final three films. Miquette is by far his worst film. It's really embarrassing. Also, apart from the exceptional final 10-15 minutes, Manon was a drag. Other than that, his films have kept a very high standard. Wages of Fear is still one of my all time favorite thrillers. Quai des Orfèvres has got to be my favorite of his outside of Wages. Always found Diabolique a little too overwritten, although it of course has loads of amazing scenes. Le corbeau has not aged well, I thought.

I think Le Corbeau is more relevant & prescient than ever, when considering the social media smear campaigns and Twitter 'lynch-mobbing' in recent years.

A shaming of an antiquated keyboard warrior if you will.

I guess if you look at it purely from the topical angle it's still relevant, but compared to the rest of his oeuvre it's very stilted and didactic. It may just be the fact that I don't fancy political and "important" films. And Le Corbeau certainly is that, both thematically and historically. On its own I just didn't think it stood too well compared to his other films.

While marginally better than that other "Woe is BB" trainwreck, this was still a bad, bad movie. Six credited writers and not one them brings any shred of authenticity to this film’s depiction of Rive Gauche happenings, which are somehow less credible than even the same year’s the Subterraneans’ interpretation of the Greenwich Village hipster lifestyle! Bardot is shown from the start as a petulant brat who runs to the Left Bank on a whim and decides it’s for her. The difference between her worlds is crudely represented on-screen by contrasting the lily white movie stars adorning her sister’s bedroom (including Jean-Claude Brialy!) with a wall of black men in her new BoHo flat, to give you some sense of the film’s cudgel-like subtlety. Eventually she falls for the man she’s been humiliating (a somewhat green Sami Frey) because he dicks her down so good (totes progressive) before his endless neuroses and obsessive jealousies eventually drive them apart. Then Bardot goes into a tailspin for the next eight hours of the movie. Ostensibly this wants to be a film of youth and a defense of the open-source sexuality Bardot exemplifies. What it really does instead is just function as the same ol' musty Oppression Porn, with all manner of baddies keeping down Bardot’s free spirit both in flashback and in present-day court. The film is a punishing and endless series of back and forths between the audience seeing Bardot’s life as it apparently happened and then hearing the prosecutors and lawyers question her in disbelief over anything we already saw or will see. This gets tedious quick. There is no dramatic potential in the questioning here because we already know what happened (and the film is not ambitious enough to use that to its advantage to do anything more than sound the same note over and over). So what’s the point, other than to pile on the indignities and injustice in a way that allows the audience to at all times feel smug and superior to her attackers?

I think you entirely missed the point of the movie, that Clouzot is questioning whether an objective notion of "the truth" can be determined with so many mitigating circumstances. The only thing we know for sure is that, yes, a murder was committed and that Dominique did it. From there it's all interpretation and the courts trying to pin down an explanation as to why this happened when one may not be possible based on Dominque's various transgressions. This isn't some post-modernist defence of the movie (a movement which I despise) but a way to approach it from the way I think Clouzot intended it to be. At the very least the formal proficiency disqualifies this from being "a bad, bad movie".

I'll have to agree mostly with Domino on this one. While I didn't think it was downright terrible, the pacing was very bad and it had the same comatose feeling to it as Le espions. It is quite baffling that Clouzot is seemingly unable to extract any suspense from the script when he outdid Hitchcock in Wages on Fear on that account. Apart from the ending – which was of course predictable, but nevertheless perfectly executed (I liked the intro quite a lot too) – this lacks any of Clouzot's trademarks, and, worst of all, it it almost as tedious a Le espions to sit through. I wouldn't say I had big problems with any of the actors, not even Brigitte Bardot, and it was especially nice to see Paul Meurisse return from Les diaboliques (one will never forget his face after seeing that film!), and of course Charles Vanel too. However, the script and characters felt very underdeveloped, and I couldn't muster any interest in any of them. Quite interesting supplementary interview with Clouzot where he mentions that he originally wrote the film for Sophia Loren, and then completely trashed the script and had a staff help him rewrite it for Bardot because his producer demanded it – even saying that he could film the old script and it would be nothing like the new one. One can only wonder what that film would have been like.

As for my watchthrough of Clouzot's filmography, I guess it can only get better now with La prisonnière which at least look visually interesting.

If anyone is interested in an older, established French director making a film about contemporary youth culture in a non-embarrassing way, I highly recommend Marcel Carne’s 1958 film Les tricheurs, which Cahiers du Cinema actually cited as a late-entry mainstream precursor to the Nouvelle Vague

domino harvey wrote: Thu May 23, 2019 3:50 pm If anyone is interested in an older, established French director making a film about contemporary youth culture in a non-embarrassing way, I highly recommend Marcel Carne’s 1958 film Les tricheurs, which Cahiers du Cinema actually cited as a late-entry mainstream precursor to the Nouvelle Vague

Even older treading the same left bank trottoirs is Becker's 1949 Rendez-vous en juillet picking up where the anti-Nazi 'Zazou' jazz adherents left off after the occupation.

At least Bardot's hair is very impressive here.

That’s more of a thought than I have to say amount this one, which was my apathy’s finest hour in as long as I can remember