Vivement dimanche! (1983)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

Long before he became a filmmaker, François Truffaut nurtured a deep fascination with pulp fiction thrillers and American film noir, and this love of murky plots and even murkier characters manifests itself through many of the films he went on to direct.  It must have been frustrating for him that his most overt attempts to imitate the Hollywood B-movie policier had generally met with a lukewarm reaction at the box office. His first homage to the classic film noir gangster film, Tirez sur le pianiste (1961), was a critical and commercial failure, as was his subsequent thriller La Sirène du Mississippi (1969).   It was only after he had notched up three success in a row in the late 1970s, early 1980s (L'Amour en fuite, Le Dernier métro  and La Femme d'à côté) that Truffaut felt confident to revisit a genre for which he felt he had a natural affinity.  What inspired him to do so was the sight of Fanny Ardant in a beige raincoat in his most recent film (La Femme d'à côté).  What a magnificent Sam Spade she would make, coolly hacking her way through the chiaroscuro undergrowth of a noir murder mystery...

Charles Williams' The Long Saturday Night was to be the starting point for Vivement dimanche!, a typically convoluted American thriller novel which Truffaut had earlier considered adapting (with Jeanne Moreau in the lead role) in the 1960s.  Truffaut was initially so disappointed by Jean Aurel and Suzanne Schiffman's adaptation of the novel that he considered abandoning the project, but was persuaded to persevere by his real-life partner Fanny Ardant and producer Gerard Lebovici.   (Truffaut never overcame his antipathy for the script and this damaged his relationship with Schiffman, his most loyal associate).   One of the things that Truffaut regretted about his earlier thriller La Mariée était en noir (1967) was that it lacked the distinctive ambiance of the série noire thriller   If he was going to make Vivement dimanche! at all, it had to be a faithful pastiche of American film noir, which meant that it had to be shot in black and white.  The immediate consequence of this was that Truffaut had difficulty securing financial backing from the French television companies, which considered black and white films to be commercially non-viable.  Having been turned down flat by TFI, Truffaut finally managed to convince the rival television company Antenne 2 to co-produce the film, but it did so with great reluctance.

With Fanny Ardant cast as the female lead (the film had, after all, been conceived for her), the main challenge was finding an actor of comparable stature to play opposite her.  A few years previously, Jean-Louis Trintignant had written a characteristically self-effacing letter to Truffaut asking him to consider him for one of his films.  Trintignant regretted having missed the glory years of the French New Wave (as this coincided with his military service) and was eager to work with a man he considered to be one of the world's great cineastes.  The part of Julien Vercel in Vivement dimanche! looks as if it may have been created specifically for Trintignant - a contradictory but likeable character who is outwardly genteel and confident, but inwardly insecure and slightly neurotic.   Trintignant's resemblance to Truffaut (in both his physical appearance and mannerisms) also made him an ideal casting choice for a director who had a tendency to project his own persona onto his screen protagonists.   With Fanny Ardant taking centre stage as the proactive crime investigator (as in virtually all of Truffaut's films, it is a female character who drives the action), Trintignant is perfectly suited to play the dependent passive male, a typically Truffaut-esque variant on the film noir hero.  Both actors are well-served by the film, particularly Ardant, who has never looked so alluring (nor so deliciously leggy) in front of the camera.

Vivement dimanche! is perhaps the only film that Truffaut made on which he was far more concerned with style than subject matter.  So keen was he that the film resembled an old American B-movie that he instructed his cinematographer Néstor Almendros not to linger over setting up shots but instead to work as quickly as possible.  (The filming was completed within 7 weeks).   Likewise, the sets were pretty basic, containing only what was absolutely necessary, and most of the action takes place at night, with sets illuminated by trusty old arc lamps that had not seen the light of day since the 1950s.  Georges Delerue's jazz-themed score is the perfect complement to the shadowy noir-scape that Almendros conjures up, exaggerating the sense of menace to an absolutely ludicrous pitch, just as in the classic noir thrillers.  Most of the location filming was done in Hyères, a small town on the Côte d'Azur which has since undergone extensive redevelopment.

Like many a classic American B-movie, the plot of Vivement dimanche! is pretty unfathomable (no matter how many times you watch it) and is so heavily reliant on facile contrivance that it is a near impossibility to take any of it seriously.  Whilst Truffaut obsessed about recreating the look of the old film noir thriller, he appeared to have no intention of replicating the genre's grittier and more sordid elements.   Despite the alarming abundance of dead bodies, Vivement dimanche! hasn't the merest whiff of sadism about it, and whenever there is any physical violence, it is usually delivered in a comic vein (such as the sequence in which Fanny Ardant clobbers a suspicious-looking Jean-Pierre Kalfon with a model Eiffel Tower, after kicking Trintignant in the shin).   It is paradoxical that whilst Truffaut was a great fan of série noire, he had a profound aversion to any form of violence, which is perhaps why the gangsters in Tirez sur le pianiste seem so absurd and why there is no real sense of threat in Vivement Dimanche!  Stylistically, Vivement dimanche! is an almost faultless pastiche of the classic film noir (laden with countless references to the films of Alfred Hitchock, Truffaut's personal hero), but what most gives it its charm is a persistent vein of downbeat humour, which is so wonderfully incongruous with the theme and style of the film.  The comic highpoint is the scene in which Fanny Ardant interviews a dumb blonde as her replacement - it has nothing to do with the plot but it is one of the funniest asides in Truffaut's entire oeuvre.

Despite Truffaut's understandable reservations over the quality of the script, Vivement dimanche! proved to be a box office hit, attracting an audience of over a million in France (admittedly far less impressive than the three million achieved by Le Dernier métro).  Buoyed up by yet another success, Truffaut was soon busily working on a raft of projects, including an adaptation of Nez de cuir, a grand historical fresco entitled 00-14 and an intimate drama La Petite voleuse (which would ultimately be directed by his assistant, Claude Miller).   Then, in the summer of 1983, within a few weeks of the French release of Vivement dimanche!, the director was diagnosed as having a brain tumour.  Despite medical intervention, Truffaut's health declined progressively and he was unable to proceed with the projects he had initiated.  After a steady worsening of his condition, he was admitted to the American hospital at Neuilly, where he died on Sunday 21st October 1984, less than a year after Fanny Ardant had given birth to his third daughter, Joséphine.  One of leading lights of the French New Wave, François Truffaut has left a lasting imprint on French cinema and his work continues to inspire and motivate today's generation of independent filmmakers.  No film director could have wished for more, least of all the one who believed cinema was more important than life.

Film Synopsis

When a man named Massoulier is shot dead, estate agent Julien Vercel is arrested as his fingerprints are on the dead man's car.  Through the intervention of his lawyer, Vercel is released from police custody and returns home to discover that Massoulier was his wife's lover.  When his wife is subsequently murdered, Vercel appears to be the obvious suspect, but his secretary Barbara is convinced of his innocence and sets out to find the real culprit.  With Vercel in hiding, Barbara soon discovers that his wife was mixed up with a criminal gang whose activities centre around a local cinema.  To resolve the mystery and expose the real killer, she has no choice but to betray the man she has fallen in love with...