In a typical bit of the-hell-with-it-let's-get-on-with-the-story plotting, Louis glimpses 'Julie' -- who is really Marion Vergano, a mercenary orphan adventuress -- in a TV report about a seedy dance club, and looks her up. The money and the partner/pimp are gone, and Marion spins several more stories which Louis swallows but we might be suspicious of. The upshot is that Louis is convinced that his wife really has fallen in love with him and takes her back, which prompts him to sell his half of the factory and go on the run with her, even murdering the detective when he catches up, wilfully ignoring Marion's evident ruthlessness and obsession with financial security above all else.



Holed up in a frozen cabin near the Swiss border, with their cash stash impounded by the cops, Louis falls sick and realises -- from a Disney Snow White newspaper strip which is excised for copyright reasons in some versions of the film -- that Marion is slowly poisoning him. He goes along with it, drinking her deadly soup, until she sees he knows what she's doing and, really together at last, they limp off in the snow presumably to die before they make it across the border.

In homage to his Master, Truffaut works in elements of Vertigo (the duality of the anti-heroine and the hero who wants to control her, Deneuve's swirly snailshell hairstyle), Psycho (the competent detective who gets suddenly killed) and Notorious (the semi-willing poisoning victim). For all his supposed misogyny, Hitchcock never presented a fatal woman quite as fatal as this, even if Truffaut -- considered a much more humanist filmmaker than Hitch -- doesn't go quite as far as Woolrich in depicting Julie/Marion as the kind of killer shrew Kathleen Turner plays in Body Heat.



Made in widescreen, with a preponderance of long- and medium-shots, it's a deliberately cool, distanced film about amour fou. Belmondo is restrained in an uncharacteristic role as mild-mannered victim, as if his screen image were being paid back for all the sexy heels he had played in earlier films -- like Cagney, he's an actor who always seems to have been dangling an insolent cigarette while slugging some adoring girl in the face. Deneuve, cold-eyed and beautiful, is always well cast as dead-inside madwomen, seductresses or vampires and has one of her great roles as the mercurial monster con-woman who feels nothing at all until the very end -- when the complete submission of her victim finally touches her frozen heart.