Cristi_Ciopron Review of A Gorgeous Girl Like Me

A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972)

Truffaut's subtly, poetic, slightly disconcerting B movies--the contrast of delicacy and sordidness

[7/10 · 17 August 2008]

Pastiches in the noble sense of the word, Truffaut's B movies, semi—serious and intelligent, are constructed on an unusual report—the delicious contrast between the finesse and the brutality/ brusqueness. Finesse of conception, of treatment, of methods; brutality and brusqueness of the primary literary sources—testifying of Truffaut's decadent attraction towards the brutal and the sordid (Truffaut himself had a rather naughty adolescence, and his physiognomy shows a certain human stuff, there are Lombrosian traces that somehow are at odds or seem to contradict his reputation of a gentle, emasculate human being and his high and refined intellectuality; he obviously wanted to look like the angelic leads—Léaud …;he did not).

From this juxtaposing of finesse and brutality issue a nonchalance and a delicious contrast. The respective pictures are not _epigone flicks, they are not pastiches in this pejorative sense, they are not derivative—but ingenious, ironic, and contradictory. They are also highly cultured products—the same vacuum pomp found at Godard as well (with an entire different function in Truffaut's cinema, etc.). This artificiality might seem at first disconcerting; yet it is of a Hitchcockian efficiency, and strictly functional. This artificiality bears values—several values, either human, personal or artistic. It can not be dismissed as a defect. It is part of the charm.