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A Gorgeous Girl Like Me
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What an outlier this is in the career of François Truffaut! Although there is a rich vein of humour in most of his films (a few 100% somber dramas such as La Chambre verte [1978] aside), A Gorgeous Girl Like Me is his only outright comedy. Compared to the rest of his work, it takes a veritably anti-aesthetic approach: zoom shots galore, obviously artificial special effects, a lot of mugging from the cast, relentlessly ‘vulgar’ and deliberately ugly production design (all those hideous wallpapers!) to mirror the generally low-class characters and their environments (it must be Truffaut’s least ‘screenshot’ movie, shunned even by ardent cinephile fans). The bizarre, extended blues-rock number by ‘Sam Golden’ (Guy Marchand), mangling American English beyond all recognition, sums up the general thrust. The film offers, for this one instance in the director’s generally hallowed career, a direct connection to the lowest depths of popular French comedy in its oafish, crowd-pleasing antics. Even George Delerue’s score displays, nervously, a try-hard comic jauntiness. And yet, and yet … There’s a lot to enjoy in A Gorgeous Girl Like Me. Bernadette Lafont is at her freest and most expressive here (her out-of-tune singing is a highlight). Among many hapless paramours, Charles Denner has some particularly splendid moments as the repressed chap who can only make love if the moment is contrived as a falling-down accident (he’s not responsible for it!). He cries in despair: “The body … the body!” In fact, the revolving gallery of variously weak, stupid, punch-drunk or easily manipulated men (headed up by a bespectacled, pre-Resnais André Dussollier in his first film role, previewing Craig Wasson’s nerd-apparition in Brian De Palma’s Body Double [1984]) constitutes a rather delightful panorama of light self-flagellation on the auteur’s identificatory part. As is often the case in Truffaut, a man’s erotic obsession leads to his doom or imprisonment – and this is more-or-less masochistically accepted as just the way love goes. As such, the film is the self-conscious flip side of Two English Girls (1971), of Mississippi Mermaid (1969) … and on the list goes. The central, storytelling premise is stretched a long way, and a little too thinly: in jail, Camille Bliss (Lafont) babbles into the tape recorder of a naïve sociologist (Dussollier), which then gets transcribed and typed up by a plain-jane secretary (Anne Kreis) who pines to be romantically noticed by her boss … In her excellent book Totally Truffaut, Anne Gillain valiantly rides to Gorgeous Girl’s rescue, declaring it to be “a work of incomparable vigour, one that deserves rehabilitation”. No mention of the zooms or the sets, though! To be fair, the analysis helpfully opens up a logic that the film shares (as Gillain ably demonstrates) with all other Truffaut works: the paths of verticality, in which Camille literally ascends while the men fall (in an endless succession of pratfalls) – and, indeed, the eyesore design lends itself ingeniously to this vaguely Crime de Monsieur Lange-like layout of stairs, windows, basements, garages … Truffaut was getting back on his feet, post-depression, by making this one – it was the springboard to one of his most masterful films, Day for Night (1973). So, no card-carrying auteurist can really ignore it, despite whatever innate taste-revulsion they may experience! Films are good for getting out of your cage that way. MORE Truffaut: Soft Skin, Love on the Run © Adrian Martin 26 February 2025 |
