Contrary to one’s received wisdom, Brigitte Bardot, barring her iconic curvaceous allure and bimbo vim and vigor, actually has acting chops ablaze in her, and H.G. Clouzot’s LA VERITE is an irrefutable testament.
A courtroom procedural is instituted and dramatized to get the bottom of the whys and wherefores concerning the death of a young promising music student Gilbert Tellier (Frey) at the hands of his former girlfriend Dominque Marceau (Bardot), who is hailed from a small town and instantly taken by the Left Bank’s modish atmospherics, only her liberated disposition can barely provide her for a living, when she finally caves in to Gilbert’s relentless courtship, little does she know, the balance starts to being tipped and soon she is the one being jilted with teary-eyed misery and abjection.
While the prosecuting attorney Eparvier (Meurisse, excellent as a hard-nosed, bloody-minded moralistic shyster) sets his mind to pin down the case as premeditated murder; defense attorney Guérin (a capable if underused Vanel ) counterpoises it by justifying the case is an act of passion, which could save Dominique from death penalty, but the truth (la vérité) sits vaguely between those two distinctions, it is the thorny middle ground that tests the legitimacy and equity of the legal system, and cannily the film finds a way to reach its coda without embroiling judicial verdict to the sticking point.
Splicing the ongoing procedural with chronological flashback unfolding the entanglement between Dominique and Gilbert in dribs and drabs, LA VÉRITÉ digs in its heels in giving Dominique a voice of her irrepressible fun-seeking temperament, unshackled by any moral obligation, she weaponizes her sex appeal to get what she wants but has a clear sense to distinguish between a flirtation and a relationship commitment, which only compromised by her fun-seeking caprices and mood swings, more often than not, precipitated by Gilbert’s straight-arrow, often Bach-infused jealousy.
Through Clouzot’s highly expressive modus operandi, the lowdown of this star-crossed pair’s undoing is unpicked arrestingly, the barrier between a highbrow music prodigy and a lowbrow soubrette, a Dionysian and Apollonian discrepancy thrusts in the different genders, a man falls in and out of his infatuation rather quickly, whereas a woman might like to play hard to get at first, but once her true feelings are entrenched, there is no way back.
A 25-year-old Bardot is a bona-fide barn-burner in the acme of her career and youth, Dominique is a full-blown character that twins Bardot’s irresistible magnetism with a defiant pervasion of vulnerability, despair and pathos, and Bardot holds it on her own from the stem to the stern without slackening. Also shining brightly is a young Sami Frey, whose callous about-face is so chilling and explosive that remarkably sustains a drastic contrast to his prior handsome shyness.
Finally, a sagacious advice from this exceedingly entertaining and truth-revealing Gallic crime-drama: always stick to your type when you choose the other half, it is safer and much wiser to handle the devil you know, than those you don’t.
referential entries: Clouzot’s DIABOLIQUE (1955, 9.2/10); LE CORBEAU (1943, 7.1/10).
