On the filming of "the Truth", Bardot's encounter with the Devil

With hirsutic hair, huge eyebrows of unusual thickness, arched back, Henri-Georges Clouzot counterbalances his disturbing appearance with a travel clerk's dress: tweed suit worn summer and winter, V-sweater under jacket, white shirt with cufflinks, black tie. A psychopath who looks like a good guy. The greatest French director of the 1950s, along with Jacques Becker and Robert Bresson, is distinguished by his intelligence and sensitivity. So is his sadism, whether it's in private life or at work.

During the month of August 1959, the director of the salary of fear (1953) spent, as always, his vacation in his suite at the Hotel La Colombe d'or, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (Alpes-Maritimes), where he communed with his collection of art: African sculptures and Bahianese colifichets. The filmmaker thinks of filming a life of Saint Therese of Lisieux. He loves icons so much that he's about to direct Brigitte Bardot.

The actress has long since invited herself into the director's brain. Looking for a character that might suit him, he first thought of a trial, that of Pauline Dubuisson, in 1951, the only woman in France tried for the murder of her ex-boyfriend against whom the death penalty was demanded. But this woman, who, according to Clouzot's word, "did not look like her crime," is an intellectual; her personality does not correspond to that of Bardot.

The director then imagines a nearby story, the trial of Dominique Marceau, an attractive young woman tried for the murder of her lover, Gilbert Tellier, a talented young conductor, promised to her sister. "Justice is not meant to appreciate feelings," says Clouzot. The character played by Brigitte Bardot once cheated on her lover. What I want to show is that everyone is telling the truth, but it's never the same. Who better than the scandalous actress to embody this atonement victim?

An oppressive breath

From La Colombe d'or, the filmmaker goes next door to the studios of La Victorine, in Nice, where the star touring do you want to dance with me?, by Michel Boisrond. When he handed him the long synopsis of Truth-a synthesis of his four thousand pages of preparatory work-the star read it without delay. The filmmaker plays big. At 51, he was convinced that "if you Don't live with young people, you die."

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