CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS. Films A2/Les Films du Carrosse/Soprofilms, 1983. France, 1983. Original title: Vivement dimanche! Also released as Finally, Sunday! Fanny Ardant, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Laudenbach, Philippe Morier-Genoud, Caroline Sihol, Georges Koulouris. Screenwriters: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Aurel, based on the novel The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams. Director: François Truffaut.

   This was François Truffaut’s final film; he died soon after it was finished. Filmed in black and white, it was intended as an homage to fellow director, Alfred Hitchcock, but I suspect that close eyes watching would spot a sizable amount of other inspirational material.

   I’ve not read the novel in many years, so I’m relying on summaries of the book I’ve found online as well as my probably unreliable memory, but the novel goes something like this: A businessman returns from a duck hunting trip only to learn that a fellow member of the club has been shot and killed in the same area. He’s accused of the crime, since it is widely suspected that the man was having an affair with is wife. When she is also found murdered, he’s the one immediately accused of both crimes.

   It is only with the help of his very efficient secretary that he is able to clear himself, during the passage of one long tense Saturday night. (If I have any of this wrong, please do correct me.)

   The film follows the story very closely, at least as far as the outline goes that I’ve supplied you above. I don’t remember the book well enough to tell you whether the same person is the killer or not.

   Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the businessman, and while Fanny Ardant is his secretary, getting top billing, perhaps surprisingly but deservedly so. She steals the show from beginning to end: a slim, full-lipped, beautiful brunette who is constantly on the move: if not walking, then running (like a girl). She even looks ravishing in a trenchcoat, and there is an extremely good reason why she is wearing a trenchcoat.

   The book and the movie do diverge. The book was an out-and-out thriller. Although filmed in black and white, with lots of interesting camera angles, the movie is often played for humor if not comedy. The real estate broker and his secretary are always bickering. She is fired more than once, and if it were possible, she once says in exasperation that she would fire him.

   Of course we all know what it means when a man and a woman in a movie are constantly battling each other, even though they are nominally on the same side. Unfortunately the two leading players don’t seem to have all that much attraction to each other. He is 20 years older, she may be four to five inches taller.

   I enjoyed this one anyway, perhaps in a way because of the above, and I recommend it to you highly. I wish I could tell you that all of the loose ends are tied up at movie’s end, but since I watched the film with subtitles (quite small and often white on white), I found myself concentrating more on reading the words than following all of the action. I will tell you this. If I find the time to watch this movie again, I most certainly will. I will also start looking for any other films that Fanny Ardant may have made. What does that tell you?