François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

11. The Role of Play: Confidentially Yours (1983)

277 A misty marsh in the early morning, a hunter returning from his hide; a rifle shot, the hunter collapses, his face covered in blood. This is how Confidentially Yours begins. Massoulier is dead. Those who are familiar with Truffaut’s films know him without ever having seen him:hisnameappearsrecurrentlyfromthetimeof The Bride Wore Black –Massoulier is Corey’s friend, from whose dialogue we learn that Massoulier “did” the hostess on the Montreal-Paris flight. In Two English Girls, the female photographer tells Claude Roc that she could meet him as a soirée at Massoulier’s place–where he waits in vain for her; in The Last Metro, Nadine makes the same remark to Bernard Granger. We also encounter, once again, the detective agency from Stolen Kisses, and the perverse fetishist from The Man Who Loved Women. As in The Soft Skin, the heroine, Barbara (Fanny Ardant), occupies room number 813 in the hotel,asatributetoMauriceLeblanc;1 hersurnameisBecker,inhomage to the director.2 At the beginning of the film, while the wife of Barbara’s boss lies murdered, one shot alludes to a phrase by Cocteau by framing a watch on the corpse’s wrist that continues ticking away the seconds;3 at the end, to unmask the murderer, the police inspector gives a recipe for potato salad over the phone that comes straight out ofThe Rules of the Game. The declaration of the lawyer–“Life is not a novel”–plays on the title of Resnais’s film.4 The Green Room points to cinema as a celebration of memory; Confidentially Yours illustrates this affirmation in a playful mode. The film is packed with internal references to Truffaut’s other works and citations of the master filmmakers. There is practically no shot, no phrase that does not involve a cinematic memory of one sort The Role of Play Confidentially Yours (1983) 278 François Truffaut: The Lost Secret or another. Even the use of black and white is meant to evoke images from the past: “Confidentially Yours attempts to restore the mysterious, brilliant, nocturnal atmosphere of the American crime comedies that delighted us in years gone by. I think that the use of black and white will help us to recover that vanished charm.”5 Truffaut thought of Confidentially Yours as “a Saturday-evening film designed to entertain.”6 It is set apart from his other films, however, on account of both its gratuitous nature and its unforeseeable status as the last of them. With this crime comedy, which is, from the beginning, a tribute to fiction and the art of storytelling, Truffaut magisterially illustrates his conviction that a film has nothing to say. He happily empties it of all content so as to emphasize narrative devices, with which he plays with an astonishing brio. In contrast to his treatment of other adaptations from American crime novels, Truffaut does not use Charles Williams ’s The Long Saturday Night as a framework for the projection of his own personal preoccupations. The film is presented as a meditation on the laws of cinematic storytelling. It is a veritable art of poetry. Figure 11.1. Barbara Becker (Fanny Ardant) and Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in Confidentially Yours, dir. François Truffaut, 1983. The Role of Play 279 At the time of its release, Truffaut said: “I regard cinema as a classical art. Above all, it is magical. And it hasn’t ceased being so because of television.Myworkisanattempttorecoverthismagic.”7 With Confidentially Yours, Truffaut conjures up this magic in a pure state. An in vitro creation cut off from reality, the film works on the perceptual system of the spectator with scientific precision: I wanted the members of my audience to be constantly captivated, absorbed. So that they would leave the theater dazed, and astonished to find themselves on the sidewalk. I would like them to forget the time, the place they are in, like Proust, when he was absorbed in reading at Combray. Above all, I wanted to make them experience emotion.8 Despite its arsenal of citations, Confidentially Yours is not a work merely for cinephiles. The allusions are part of the pleasure, but they are notindispensabletoit.Inanageinwhichtelevisiontrivializestheimage, Truffaut seeks first and foremost to rivet the spectator to his or her seat. Above all, Confidentially Yours reflects “a hatred of the documentary,” which “presents things or people for viewing without the allure of fiction .”9 His aim was to avoid...