Movie Type: Romantic Mystery, Psychological Thriller
Themes: Miscarriage of Justice, Amateur Sleuths
Main Cast: Fanny Ardant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Laudenbach, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Caroline Sihol, Philippe Morier-Genoud
Release Year: 1983
Country: FR
Run Time: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
In this light, sometimes tongue-in-cheek mystery based on a Charles Williams thriller -- with snippets of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and even Victor Hugo -- director François Truffaut showcases one of his favorite actresses, Fanny Ardant, as an enterprising secretary in love with her boss but up against clearing him of murder. Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a real estate dealer accused of killing his wife and her lover. He hides in his office while his secretary, Barbara (Ardant), sets out to discover what really happened and why. When Barbara starts looking into the dark past of her boss' wife, she comes across illicit love affairs, a prostitution ring, and shady private detectives, until, finally, her suspicions turn toward Julien's lawyer himself. Tragically, Vivement Dimanche was to be Truffaut's last film; the great French director died of a cancerous brain tumor in 1984. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
Review
François Truffaut's last film is a homage to Hitchcock. The director had long been an admirer of Hitchcock's work, and the two men collaborated on a volume covering Hitchcock's life and work, Hitchcock/Truffaut, which became one of the first texts to seriously analyze a director's films, and one of the most sumptuously illustrated coffee-table books of the late '60s. Truffaut's career is marked with numerous homages to Hitchcock, perhaps none more transparent than his relatively early film The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée Était en Noir, 1968), which is tellingly one of the least successful of his films. With Confidentially Yours, Truffaut was returning to the very safe territory of the gangster melodrama, crossed with a love story, almost as if the film were a Claude Chabrol project, rather than a Truffaut film. When Julien Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is suspected of murder, his secretary, Barbara Becker (Fanny Ardant), must work to clear his name. Shot in muted black-and-white, the film clearly harkens back to Truffaut's love affair with American detective thrillers of the 1940s and '50s, and is a pleasant enough way to kill an afternoon. But in the end, the film is deeply inconsequential, a commercial project that ultimately could have been made by any one of a dozen directors. It's sad that Truffaut went out with such a conventional project, but perhaps at this point it was too much to hope for more. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
Xavier Saint-Macary - Bertrand Fabre, photographer; Anik Belaubre - Cashier at the Eden; Castel Casti - Taxi Driver; George Coulouris - Lablache; Josiane Couëdel - M. Clement's Secretary; Yan Dedet - Angel face; Nicole Felix - Scarred Woman; Pierre Gare - Insp. Poivert; Hilton McConnico - Prostitute's Client; Pascale Pellegrin - Secretary; Jean-Louis Richard - Louison; Roland Thénot - Officer Jambrau; Jacques Vidal - The King; Martine Barraqué-Curie - Passerby with Newspaper; Marie-Aimée Debril; Jacques Gaillard - Man on Bike; Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko - Rowdy Slav; Thi Loan Nguyen - Chinese Woman at Commissioners Office
