La Vérité (1960): The Naked Truth

La Vérité [The Truth] is a classic French courtroom drama written and directed by the auteur Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring the one and only Brigitte Bardot.

Clouzot was, for a time considered a competitor to Alfred Hitchcock for his interest in and aptitude for making films with an element of suspense. Before La Vérité, some of Clouzot’s other films included Le Corbeau [The Raven] (1943) – a psychological thriller about a small town torn apart by a series of mysterious poison pen letters; The Wages of Fear (1953)  - a seat of the pants action-thriller about a group of desperate guys on a highly hazardous mission driving a couple of trucks loaded with the volatile explosive nitrogycerin across three hundred miles of treacherous terrain; and Les Diabolique (1955) [aka Diabolique, or The Devils] – a psychological horror thriller in which the aggrieved wife and mistress of a wicked schoolmaster team up to plot his murder, only to find that something has gone mysteriously wrong.

Bardot hit the big time in the public imagination with her role in the 1956 film “… And God Created Woman” when she was just 21. She plays Juliette, a coquettish, free spirited orphan in her late teens in sleepy St Tropez. Juliette loves flirting and having a good time. Their patience exhausted, her foster family gives up on her. To avoid a return to the orphanage, she needs to marry a decent man who can support her and treat her right. Soon, she gets caught up in a love triangle, wherein lies the drama. The story - decent, not great - is clearly secondary to the natural beauty and sexuality exuded by its star.  

Juliette knows what she’s about. Clothes are such a bother, the less she wears them the better. When we first meet her, she’s sunbathing nude on a rooftop, behind a white sheet hung on a clothesline. She prefers to go about barefoot. Writes film columnist and historian, Chuck Stephens, “Super-abundant and extraterrestrial, Bardot was far too human, yet far beyond ‘real’. Once seen, she could not be unseen, and in And God Created Woman, she was seen as never before. …  [Her Juliette is] an entity so natural that shoes seem to betray her feet, and on whom nothing seems as pornographic as a wedding dress.” 

Anyway, on to La Vérité - which is a far better movie, considered by many Bardot’s best film. Here, Bardot plays Dominique Marceau, a girl not unlike Juliette in her wildness. Dominique is not an orphan – she has an actual family in the small, parochial town where she has been raised, but her parents are just as disapproving of her free-spirited ways as were Juliette’s.  She flees not into marriage, but to the promise of freedom and adventure offered by the big city, Paris, there to live a counter-cultural life among the bohemians of the day. She’s not there for the poets, the writers, or the painters, but for the absence of discipline and the fun - the cafes and bars, the dancing, the free sex. Eventually, she falls tragically in love. 

La Vérité opens at the apartment of Dominique’s former lover, Gilbert (Sami Frey), a promising young orchestral conductor, who is engaged to marry Dominique’s strait-laced sister, Annie (Marie-José Nat). Gilbert has been shot dead. In the adjacent kitchen, there’s a strong smell of natural gas, along with the unconscious body of Dominique, an apparent suicide.  Although Dominique survives, the next time we see her she is on trial for murder. 

From here, film devolves into a top-notch courtroom drama, with the story leading up to the deadly event unfolding via trial testimony that is illustrated by dramatic flashbacks much in the style of last year’s Anatomy of a Fall or, for that matter, Anatomy of a Murder (1960) which was produced at about the same time as La Vérité. There courtroom jockeying between the counsel for the prosecution and for the defense is also quite riveting.

For the lawyers among us, one interesting aspect of the case is procedural: effectively, there are two prosecutors: one representing the state [L'avocat général], another representing the victim’s family.  The prosecutors narrate the (mostly) uncontroverted facts of the case without resorting to the tedious exercise of extracting this stuff from in-court witnesses.  The account is peppered now and then with suppositions about what must have happened, bolstered on occasions by direct questions put to Dominique herself. The prosecutors’ own moral judgments are not infrequently given voice during these recitations as well.

For example, describing Dominique’s life before she left home, the avocat general tells the court that whereas Annie was a good child, diligent at school, excelling at her violin lessons, and respectful of her parents; Dominique was disobedient, was expelled from school for bringing in a scandalous book, ran around with boys, frequented cafes, and went to the movies several times a week - in short, she was living, in his words, a “life of dissipation”.

It is not disputed that Dominique shot Gilbert. The issue at trial is her intent. Was this a cold-blooded murder or a crime of passion? The defense attorney (Charles Venel) argues that she acted without any intent, overcome by sudden anger when the man she loved rejected her. The lawyer for Gilbert’s family (Paul Meurisse, terrific) seeks to portray Dominique as an amoral seductress, incapable of love, who killed for revenge. Given Gilbert’s background, his sophistication and accomplishment, neither side believes that he could possibly have truly loved someone like Dominique other than sexually. Dominique’s truth is different. “We loved each other,” she tearfully insists, “just not at the same time.” That was the tragedy. Whichever way you read it, their story is compellingly passionate and operatic. 

Bardot gives an amazing performance as Dominique that’s sexy, sympathetic, and remarkably fresh nearly 65 years later.  Even in our much more liberated era, it still registers as shockingly brazen. Bardot has that indefinable “it” quality – with a mesmerizing sexual presence affecting male and female viewers alike. More than that, though, the lady can act.  Whatever Dominique’s situation, we are in the moment with her. She is equally convincing as the tearful, grief-stricken defendant we see in the courtroom dock, as when Gilbert first sees her in Annie’s apartment – an uninhibited girl, nude in bed, under the sheets, listening to music and doing the rhumba with her butt. 

La Vérité aims to underscore the hypocrisy of applying different attitudes and sexual mores to men and to women, and it does so somewhat successfully.  But seen with hindsight more than six decades after the film was produced, it is clear that Clouzot was trying to have it both ways.  On the one hand, we are encouraged to see Dominique as a real person, rather than as just a sexual object; and thanks to Bardot’s sympathetic performance, we do.  

On the other hand, La Vérité not only shows the objectification of attractive women but itself continues the commodification of Bardot as a sex kitten, all the while playing into the moral disapprobation of liberated female sexuality – through the reactions she provokes in her parents and sister, and even Gilbert when he’s not besotted, as well as through the lawyers’ attitudes - prosecutors and defense both. Times have definitely changed, but as recognized in Anatomy of a Fall, not as much as we pretend to believe. 

La Vérité is a real classic, folks, and that’s the truth! If you have never seen it or haven’t done for a long while, I heartily recommend that you check it out. And it’s easy to do (see below). Note: This is the 1960 movie – not to be confused with another French La Verite from 2019. That one, which stars Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche is a completely different story, also pretty good, but not a hall of famer like this one.

2 hours 7 minutes in French with English subtitles

Grade: A

Free to stream on YouTube [an excellent print, by the way]. Also available to buy from The Criterion Collection – and occasionally available to stream on The Criterion Channel, but not at this time.