2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"For you to love me, I should be dead.", May 2, 2008
This review is from: The Vanishing Fiancée [Region 2] (DVD)
"For uncaring people, Genevieve's eyes are closed, but for you, Gerard, they will always be open. Don't think that you've lost her. Think now that you can never lose her. Devote all your thoughts, all your actions, all your love to her. The dead belong to us, if we agree to belong to them. Believe me, Gerard, the dead can continue to live."
Francois Truffaut's rarest feature, La Chambre Verte aka The Green Room is also one of his most quietly compelling, with the director also taking the lead role as a World War One veteran already traumatised by the many friends he lost in the war before the death of his wife and the betrayal of a friend left him living his life only for the memory of the dead. Working for a dying newspaper where he specialises in obituaries, his only significant relationship with Nathalie Baye's auctioneer's assistant, Julien Davenne has turned one room in his house into a shrine to his wife already, but, having reached the point in life where he knows more people who are dead than alive, still feels the need for something more secure that can include all of `his dead.' Yet the more he tries to preserve the memory, the further he gets from it, enclosing his dead in `transparent walls of imagination' because it's easier to live with idealised memories of the unchanging dead than the constant possibility of disappointment from the living. Even Baye's character, who has her own obsession with a dead lover, knows that a real relationship with him is impossible because "for you to love me, I should be dead."
On paper it sounds like the setup for a horror film, especially given the morbid subject matter taken from Henry James' short stories The Altar of the Dead and The Beast in the Jungle, not to mention the absurd US title The Vanishing Fiancée, which makes it sound like a Hitchcockian thriller. Yet, like James' oft-filmed Turn of the Screw, this isn't so much a ghost story - there are no supernatural frissons here - as one about the living's self-destructive obsession with the dead. Nor is the approach sensational: rather than feverish, nightmarish and horrific in the manner of, say, Polanski's The Tenant (with which this would make an interesting double-bill), it's cold and sober as befits a story about a man systematically draining life from himself until he is no longer even an observer of life nor even of the memory of the dead but one of the dead himself. He denies himself all emotion, even claiming that he cannot hate, though he is obsessed with the worthiness or unworthiness of who is included in his shrine to the point of revulsion. Even his relationship with Baye is shattered when he discovers her own green room and who it is dedicated to.
The film was the only true leading role Truffaut played, and it's clearly a very personal film for him. It's hard not to think that the shrine Julien consecrates to his dead is doing double service for Truffaut's as well - the photos there include historical figures who influenced him such as Oscar Wilde, composer Maurice Jaubert (who was killed in the Second World War and whose Concert Flamand graces the film in the most literal sense of the word) and former collaborators like Oskar Werner (with whom he famously fell out on the shooting of Fahrenheit 451 and could almost be seen as a model for the one dead person in Julien's life that he cannot bring himself to honor). Rather than an ego trip, it's perfect casting, with Truffaut, his haunted face first glimpsed over archive footage of the war, giving a contained and controlled performance that's remarkably effective at drawing you into his obsession despite appearing to go to great lengths to keep the audience at a distance and never begging sympathy or going for easy sentiment. Although the deliberate stylistic emotional remove of Truffaut and Jean Grualt's screenplay does mean that the film is never particularly emotionally moving, it does make for a fascinating and often mesmerising character study.
Sadly the film, and in particular Nestor Almendros' cinematography are not well served on Fox-MGM/UA's Continental PAL DVD: a fullframe color transfer that loses a surprising amount of visual information in being cropped from its original 1.66:1 ratio with plenty of scratches on a disc that not only comes without any extras but doesn't even have a menu page. Still, until the rights revert to someone who'll take more care with its presentation it's better than nothing.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genuine tragedy, drame psychologique in European style, January 24, 2009
This review is from: The Vanishing Fiancée [Region 2] (DVD)
While I cannot add much more than the other reviewer (Wilssmer), in that he covers the dramatic issues and the poor technical conversion to this format, I have a word for American viewers. This is a story that is stunningly realistic in a tragic psychological sense. An apparently good man, played by Truffaut, has reached a dead end in his life; burdened by the dead - a beloved wife, friends in the war, and a great betrayer - he chooses to live with them rather than to move ahead. A lovely woman (Baye) recognizes the kind man that she knew as an adolescent, and attempts to get close to him, to bring him along with her as she chooses to live and love. It is truly beautiful and the outcome is so very French in the sense that European film buffs will instantly know. The film is moving, extremely dark and subtle, and grounded in a historical experience that is entirely missing from the American mentality.
Warmly recommended to deep film fans and Truffaut aficianados.
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