It was inevitable after reading Marked Woman I’d catch at least one movie it discussed, which turned out to be THE RED KIMONA (1925) which I think is “kimono” misspelled. This begins where many sex-worker sagas climax, with protagonist Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) murdering the man who seduced her, swore he loved her, then pimped her out.
When the all-male jury hears her story, they acquit her, then a shallow reformer (“She found social work socially useful.”) takes Gabrielle into her household to redeem the fallen woman. It doesn’t go well as there are few employees willing to hire a woman with Gabrielle’s backstory — when she leaves the reformer’s house, will she have any choice but to return to sex work? Can her true love reach her in time (I never thought the cliche of racing to the airport before someone leaves, or in this case the train station, went back this far). This starts really slow but the pathos increases effectively as it goes along. “‘I love you’ — sometimes as beautiful as a prayer, sometimes a lie.”
Happily married Gerard Depardieu is knocked for a loop when a couple moves in to the neighboring house and THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (1981) turns out to be former lover Fanny Ardant. The couple had a trainwreck relationship years before their current marriages; fortunately now that they’re older, wiser and married they can certainly keep their old passions in check … right? Very much in Truffaut’s familiar mode of troubled marriages and people with uncontrollable emotions, but he’s very good in that vein. “Life has more imagination than us.”
Tragically Truffaut died in 1984, a mere 52 years old. That makes huis last movie CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS (1983), which shows his fondness for Hitchcock but in the light-hearted mode of The Lady Vanishes. Ardant returns, now in the role of Barbara, a secretary whose boss (Jean-Louis Trintignant) appears to have murdered the man who cuckolded him, then the wife caught between them. Ardant, however, becomes convinced there’s more to the story; unraveling the tangles alongside her boss she explores a night-club and a covert brothel, assaults a priest and finally cracks the case. It’s not a classic, though it is very Truffaut, for example, in the woman obsessed murderer (“Women are magic! You will not understand my motive because I never belonged to the land of men!”); overall a satisfactory final film, though I’ll always wish he’d had more years to make movies. “It wasn’t me who said the priest looked like a killer.”
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