Friday, Jul. 07, 1961

Serious Brigitte

The Truth (Hans Films; Kingsley-lnternational) is a half-serious attempt to make a wholly serious film starring Brigitte Bardot. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot succeeds for the most part in keeping his drama sober, although now and then he throws in a few peepshots for the skin trade. But his effort to be earnest has unstrung the tautness with which he filmed Diabolique and Wages of Fear. For its last half hour, Truth is as limp as old lettuce.

Brigitte plays a girlstrous Left Bank girl named Dominique, who with a flick of her hip steals her prissy sister's boy friend (Sami Frey). At first she torments him, then falls in love. He counters that she never meant anything more than sex to him. She threatens suicide. When he taunts her about these threats, she shoots him and tries to kill herself.

This much is a story of indifference; the court trial that frames it is a drama--and occasionally a melodrama--of incomprehension. The judges who try Dominique refuse to believe that she shot her man in blind despair growing out of her love for him, not premeditated spite. They listen stolidly when her defense attorney tells them that she had been treated heartlessly, hide flickering lust with censoriousness when the prosecution relentlessly details her love affairs. Hopelessly, she lashes at the judges: they are old men in silly robes, they cannot understand, they are dead. That night she commits suicide, and the next morning the judges stare at one another in a final communion of opacity.

Much of the film is shocking to a viewer unused to the apparent helplessness of the defendant in a French trial. Yet Director Clouzot's somewhat muddled J'Accuse is directed at more than the Napoleonic Code. It is intended to be a reproach to a callous society. But society will seize any excuse, even tepid acting, to avoid recognizing a reproach. And while Brigitte is an adequate comedienne, her dramatic acting is in the old cowboy tradition of two emotions--hat on and hat off. Except, of course, that with BB what comes off is not a hat.

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