Just perfect...

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely Fantastic

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

FINALLY, Sunday! is one of the many films made by French auteur Francois Truffaut, shot in black and white. This one's a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Hitchcockian themes throughout, and it has a lightness of touch similar to Hitch's work of the 1930s. However, in the heavy hands of Truffaut I found it something of a chore to watch; the director's approach is to eke out every little bit of every little scene and the result is long-winded and oddly seriously despite the lightness of the subject matter. It's as if the director has been so painstaking that all the fun is taken out of the production.

For such a big Hitchcock fan Truffaut disappointed a bit with this movie. We see the starkness of Hitchcock. We see the mood music as in Psycho. But it is not Hitchcock. The lead actress is unremarkable in every way. Her face is quite gaunt. None of the actors stand out. The story tends to drag. Truffaut was perhaps better for Hitchcock in helping to keep his name before the public than any other director. There is a disparity between his admiration for the British director and his ability to make the same type of suspense films. The film had a very foreign feel to it, not pleasantly so. There was maybe not enough starkness. Definitely not enough richness. But worth seeing to better understand Truffaut's style.

I was a bit disappointed by this movie. I expected a complex drama in the Hitchcock style but I got a mediocre story more like a Hitchcock TV presentation. It isn't a bad movie. It's more a vehicle for Fanny Ardant. She is a pleasure to watch and listen to. Jean-Louis Trintignant was also good. The writing wasn't all that great. The plot was simplistic and some scenes were clunky.

Confidentially Yours aka Vivement Dimanche is a spoof/tribute to noir/detective/Hitchcock films. Someone (it won't take you long to figure out who) commits a brutal murder and the police suspect Jean Louis Trintignant ( a real estate agent) but his secretary (a girl Friday he has just fired, perfectly played by Fanny Ardant--whose movie this is) investigates (dressed in a trench coat -- why she must wear a trench coat is one of the gags), determined to clear him.It is a shaggy dog because it piles on the clues, close scrapes, crimes, etc. at ten times the rate of the films it salutes. It is a greyhound because it must get all that into 110 minutes, which it does with zest and comic theatricality (referenced of course by the subplot of a comic theatrical performance being given by Ardant's amateur theater group).As film making it would have been a lot fresher if it had been made in 1964 rather than 1984, but that should not effect your viewing experience of an expertly made madcap mystery. I would have preferred the film in color. I know why it is in black and white, but it does not seem to me to have any particular aesthetic merit as a black and white film. While no masterpiece, it was perhaps not a bad way to end a directorial career with a loving look back to all those great mysteries and screwball comedies of yore.