La Vérité (1960)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Film Review

With La Vérité, director Henri-Georges Clouzot was able to deliver his most virulent attack on a society that was crippled by outdated bourgeois morality and incapable of moving with the times.  Clouzot's earlier anti-bourgeois piece Le Corbeau (1943) had gone down as well as a Black Mass in the Vatican but censure and open hostility against him did nothing to quench the director's life-long contempt for the petty-minded hypocrisies that soiled French society and restricted intellectual freedom.  In La Vérité, Clouzot's most perfect and most absorbing film, it is not a murderer who is on trial but a whole generation who are judged by their elders to be egoistical, lazy and immoral.  The truth over guilt or innocence is irrelevant.  In the end we know that stubborn, stony hearted prejudice will decide the verdict.

The film's narrative structure - a courtroom drama in which past events are related in flashback - emphasises the rift between two generations who appear to have nothing in common.  Those who sit in judgement in the courtroom are manifestly right-leaning traditionalists who look as if they may have once been diehard supporters of Marshal Pétain.  Those who are most visible in the flashbacks are the youth of today, bohemians who live for the moment and have no intention of letting old-fashioned middleclass values spoiling their fun.  These are two completely different worlds, divided by a wildly different set of moral values, and what Clouzot shows us is the generational rift that would widen in the course of the 1960s, culminating in the dramatic events of May 1968.

If he had wanted a symbol of liberated modern youth to provide the focus for his thesis Clouzot could not have done much better than to opt for Brigitte Bardot.  Since her revelation in Roger Vadim's Et Dieu... créa la femme a few years previously, Bardot had become the living embodiment of the uninhibited modern woman, an icon for the profound changes that were taking place in western society as the sexual revolution gathered momentum.  By putting Bardot in the dock and having her humiliated and incriminated by a hostile prosecuting counsel Clouzot is making her a martyr for the post-De Gaulle generation, in a way that is more than vaguely reminiscent of Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928).  Irrespective of the nature of her crime, Dominique will be the victim of an unforgiving society that regards her as a moral threat - one which must be expunged without mercy.

Brigitte Bardot may be ideally suited as a figurehead for modern youth but she was just about the last person you would expect to see in an H.G. Clouzot film.  At the time, Bardot was best known for appearing in lightweight comedies, exploited more for her physical beauty and gamine charms than for any acting ability she might have.  The truth was that most directors who employed Bardot only wanted to take advantage of her sex symbol status; few saw her as a serious actress.  Clouzot was one of the few who saw Bardot's potential and, in the course of a gruelling production schedule, he ruthlessly set about unleashing it.  No director had pushed the actress so far and he succeeded by coaxing out of her the finest performance of her career.  There is a profound irony in the fact it was Clouzot, a tyrant and misogynist amongst filmmakers, who films Bardot with most humanity and sensitivity.  In the course of the film, the carefree blonde bombshell is dragged through the most ferocious of emotional wringers, until she ends up a pathetic, self-loathing wreck of a woman.  It is a harrowing ordeal to witness and only an actress of exceptional talent could imbue it with such devastating truth and poignancy.  Bardot may have reached the pinnacle of her achievement, but it came at a cost.  She came to identify too closely with her character and attempted suicide, like the heroine she portrays, shortly after completing work on the film.

Bardot's is not the only superlative performance that helps to make La Vérité such a riveting piece of cinema.  Her co-star, Sami Frey, is also at the top of his game, just as convincing, just as unfathomable and alluring, as the victim of her irresistible sensual charms.  As Dominique's 'goody two-shoes' sister, Marie-José Nat is the perfect complement to Bardot's 60s nymph, whilst Paul Meurisse and Charles Vanel each hold our attention in a vice-like grip as the prosecuting and defence lawyers.  Despite the high standard of acting around her, it is Bardot who shines most brightly, for once impressing not with her beauty but with the raw emotional power of a performance that totally eclipses all of her other work.  What should have been the start of a glittering new phase of her career proved to be no more than an aberration.  Apart from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) and Louis Malle's Viva Maria! (1965), Bardot's subsequent career would be a continuation of what had gone before, a criminal waste of talent.

Film Synopsis

Dominique Marceau is on trial for the murder of her lover Gilbert Tellier.  Public sympathy is not on her side and the jury is not expected to decide in her favour.  The prosecuting counsel is fierce in its condemnation of her, branding her an irresponsible and heartless slut who killed an innocent man without any regard to the consequences.  The defence has a more difficult task presenting her as a victim of a fundamentally corrupt world.  As the trial follows its course to an all too predictable outcome, Dominique recalls the events that have led up to her present sorry predicament.  When she first met Gilbert, he was engaged to be married to her sister, Annie.  In those days, Dominique led a reckless life, living only for pleasure.  She already had several men in her life when Gilbert came on the scene, and naturally she had to seduce him!

Gilbert put up no resistance and soon realised he preferred the sexually uninhibited Dominique to her strait-laced sister.  He promptly broke off his engagement to Annie so that he could prolong his affair with Dominique, but the latter could never content herself with one man.  Sickened by his lover's inability to commit herself to him, Gilbert decided to return to Annie, but in a moment of madness Dominique got into an argument with him and shot him dead.  Now Dominique's fate is to be decided by a handful of men, the sex she has good reason to loathe.  The case against her is damning and she knows it will take more than a few eloquent words from her defence counsel to keep her from the scaffold.  Realising that she has already lost, Dominique takes matters into her own hands.  When there is so much prejudice in the world, the truth hardly matters...