La Vérité

A dissection of life and amorality among the young and disaffected in the late '50s, with Bardot giving her finest ever performance as the girl whose headlong rush from her stiff bourgeois home into a series of frustrating affairs with Parisian intellectuals leads to her trial for murder. Clouzot, the man who made the wonderful but terribly cynical Le Corbeau, The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, is as cold and savage as ever in his observation of French manners, although the courtroom scenes that frame the flashbacks to Bardot's past tend to decrease the tension inherent in the subject. Far from his finest work, but still compelling viewing: compared to Clouzot, even Fassbinder seemed a romantic.