Legendary French New Wave director François Truffaut's last film, Confidentially Yours, wants to be a film noir so badly that it can taste it. It was based on the novel The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams, a beloved American author of hard-boiled crime fiction. It follows Claude Massoulier, an estate agent accused or murdering his wife's lover. Things look even worse for Claude when his wife ALSO turns up murdered! With the entire country on the look-out for him, he enlists the aid of his secretary, Barbara Becker, to investigate the case and clear his name. It's an interesting twist on an old film noir standard: the man on the run and the woman who loves him. But unfortunately, as with most of the other times when Truffaut tried to explicitly emulate one of his favorite genres or filmmakers, the end result falls flat. There's no chemistry between Claude and Becker. Considering that the two are supposed to be in love, their cold, sterile performances smack of the uncanny valley. Truffaut valiantly mimics classic film noir cinematography, even shooting the entire film in black-and-white. But the film lacks the sense of despair and moral ambiguity that act as the life blood of real film noir. So the cinematography, while very pretty, seems unnecessary. The central mystery of the film isn't even that interesting. I found myself bored and unimpressed during the denouement. It's always unfortunate when a great director ends his career with a mediocre or sub-par film. I like to think that Truffaut had more film projects in mind when he tragically died of a brain tumor the year after Confidentially Yours was released. But such is life.
5/10
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