The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Original title: La mariée était en noir

Warning: there will be some spoilers - if you really care in case of a film of this age, loosely based on a novel considerably older

A mysterious woman we eventually learn to be called Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) travels all over France to meet, charm and eventually kill a number of men. As it will turn out, these men are guilty parties in the shooting death of Julie’s husband right on the church steps directly after their wedding vows. These guys, one and all, are also what can only be called sexist pigs.

Though, in one of the more interesting moves François Truffaut’s adaptation of Cornel Woolrich’s novel makes, they are all very different kinds of sexist pigs, each and every one of them drawn in loving (?) detail and portrayed by a wonderful actor. Their avenger comes to these guys playing on each one’s specific weakness and neediness (as you know, there’s hardly anyone needier than a sexist pig). Like an avenging chameleon, she takes on exactly the role that will get her target’s trust, so she can eventually kill him in a very personal, close contact manner – Julie’s not a killer to look away from what she does.

But then, she is also one of those movie avengers who very much understands that what she does is wrong on various levels – certainly for her own existence as an independent being. Moreau’s portrayal of the emptiness inside of Julie – exactly the quality that makes it possible for her to become just the right woman for each murder – is chilling, as well as curiously touching. It does obviously help that her victims are all assholes in a way still all too recognizable in 2024, even without the somewhat accidental killing of her husband.

Formally, this is a very playful film. Truffaut uses the episodic structure of Julie going from murder to murder to create something akin to a series of connected short stories of differing tone held together by the presence of Moreau and a Bernard Hermann score. Hermann is particularly obvious a choice for the score because this is also one of those French films that bow at the altar of Hitchcock but can never quite achieve their idol’s way with suspense and tension. Being French films, after all, everyone in them is too much in love with talking cleverly, and everything’s happening at too leisurely a pace, not things that lend themselves to the creation of true suspense.

So it is often more the idea of suspense than the actual thing running through films like this; of course, a filmmaker like Truffaut is much to intelligent not to know what he’s doing or not doing in this regard, and so the Hitchcockian elements are all part of that  sense of playfulness, of the formal aspects of filmmaking being a formal game. This turns what could (perhaps should) be a weakness of the film into a strength.

It is not as if Truffaut can’t do conventional suspense when he wants to. In fact, The Bride Wore Black ends on a sequence that indeed is a perfect example of relatively straightforward suspense perfectly realized. Curiously, it also prefigures the beloved 2010s blockbuster trope of the villain of a film letting themselves be caught as integral part of their plans.

Looked at as a whole, there’s a fascinating duality to The Bride. Its formal playfulness, the sense of delight you get from it, the sense of beauty of many of the shots on paper do not fit the grimness of the actual tale being told (and embodied by Moreau’s unmoving face whenever she is not playing a role for one of her victims) here. There is a disquieting quality to the gap between form and content at the core of the film. This might very well be a conscious choice; if it is an accident of filmmaking, it is certainly one that provides The Bride Wore Black with a particular staying power for me.