morrison-dylan-fan After watching the gripping Bride Wore Black I decided to take a look at the other credits of auteur co-writer (along with Jean-Loup Dabadie) /director François Truffaut.Reading reviews of Truffaut's other works,I spotted a title which appeared to mix sex Comedy with Film Noir!,which led to me getting ready to find out how gorgeous the girl is.The plot:Writing a thesis on female criminals, Stanislas Prévine learns about a prisoner called Camille Bliss,who is in jail for the murder of her dad,and her lover Arthur.Pushing the prison guard to give him a pass, Prévine starts holding a series of interviews with Bliss.Recording the interview so that he and his secretary can make a transcript of the minutes, Prévine begins to hear from Bliss about her wild lifestyle.As he goes deeper into Bliss's life, Prévine finds himself falling in love for her,and also starting to believe that Bliss has been wrongly imprisoned.View on the film:Kicking off Bliss's lifestyle with a young Bliss flying in the air,director François Truffaut, (who just a few weeks before filming had left a clinic after suffering from depression over his breakup with Catherine Deneuve) and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn let their hair down for a wild child,who leaps across the movie from the tie- dye colour opening to the bitter laughs of Prévine's final interview with Bliss.Placing Bliss and Prévine in Film Noir settings from a grime covered prison to lovers on the run roads, Truffaut & Pierre-William Glenn slide the Film Noir into raunchy sex Comedy.Whilst never feeling fully relaxed, Truffaut makes the genre mash-up a wonderful adventure,with superbly delivered tracking shots following Bliss life of crime being joined by sexy frolics,which includes a race car album being played during sex.Rolling out their adaptation of Henry Farrell's pulp novel with Bliss telling her life story in rapid-fire monologues,the screenplay by Truffaut and Dabadie playfully take on the unreliable Film Noir narrator,by keeping Bliss's narration in a straight line,whilst the flashbacks uncover a life of petty crime and risqué encounters with men and their wives.Spending most of the title in flashbacks,the writers cut terrific interjections into Bliss and Prévine's interviews,which reveal Prévine to be pulled towards an alluring femme fatale.Entering the movie in bottle cap glasses, André Dussollier gives a great performance as Stanislas Prévine,with Dussollier giving Prévine a real passion for Bliss,whilst making sure to keep him an outsider by putting Prévine in a neat dorky tie. Firing the monologues across the screen in a rapid-fire manner,the gorgeous Bernadette Lafont (who also appears topless) gives an excellent performance as Bliss,thanks to Lafont giving Bliss a hilarious sparkle over the unlucky men in her life,and also wrapping Bliss in a mysterious femme fatale shade,as Prévine discovers how dangerous a gorgeous girl can be.

adrian290357 I must begin by admitting my headlong love for Truffaut's work. As connoisseur ratings go, this might not be his best film (Jules et Jim, Argent de Poche, Le Dernier Metro, Baisers Volés, Tirez sur le Pianiste, and Les 400 Coups are all at least as good and possibly better) but there is just so much life, tongue in cheek, unbridled pleasure in directing and in treating life as art, and the acting is so deceptively simple that I have to say this is probably my most favourite film by one of my most favourite directors. The initial sequence with the young dilettante's flatulent and cursing father kicking her rugby style sets the tone for the rest of the film, consistently pitting the stupidity of the male against the instinctive and openly unscrupulous intelligence of the leading female (there is hope yet in the typist but she is not the one all the men fall in love with...) Glorious comic touches sprinkle the film but if I had to select the cherry on this cake that would be the sequence where Denner, the rat exterminator, is waiting for Bernadette to come back from her visit to the singer. Look at how he tries to establish where the racing cars are that he hears but cannot see on the open road! Oh you must see this!

Napoleonforever Humor, action, suspense, romance all rolled into this underrated Truffaut film; circa 1972 and probably was not well received during the titles' release. Starting out as a research project for female criminals, to "saving" an innocent prisoner then onto getting imprisoned yourself( The Professor) and the ultimate betrayals from the ones who are charged to protect people from such evils, the Attorney.Bernadette Lafont stars as Camille, the imprisoned woman who has had bad luck since childhood( and she does not help her causes along the way at the most inopportune times), shines and carried this movie the entire way. Her beauty and expressions are at the highest levels ever seen on the silver screen.Yes, many plots and twists, but they are all spaced and placed in order, via flashbacks in the very beginning, and the sequences of subsequent events throughout this film make sense. The audience is not quite sure if Camille deserved her fate in prison and what her true character is like; will she repay the Professor for freeing her as he freed her in kind? Did Camille have what it takes to be faithful to a man or did the continuing bad luck and survival force her into the "easier way out"? The audience cannot possibly expect how this movie turns out, thus achieving the rare quality of total suspense.Cinematography is excellent for a 1972 film, and getting an Exterminator, Western-style Saloon washed-up whiskey-soaked wanna-be and the other characters were all a credit to good writing, and finally, fantastic directing by Truffaut. Part of the French New Wave of Cinema was the exclusion of Studio sets and backgrounds, and it is evident that Truffaut was a Master of locations as he selected unforgettable places and structures.Many say Truffaut was an overrated director. I say not so. Truffaut was brilliant and left this world too soon. If you want to see overrated, keep seeing the Hollywood cookie-cutter promoted-to-the-hilt templates that are the cash-cow machine for the industry.

guylevin Starting out "Une belle fille comme moi" seems like it might be going somewhere interesting - The study of the criminal female mind. But this film settles quickly into a silly immature comedy ripe with stereotypes and overacting. Alas, if only any of these were actually funny.