Trintignant

I made good inroads into my Alain Robbe-Grillet boxset these last few days with screenings of the director’s first three films. What’s most striking about these films is how much my expectations have been confounded in one way or another – case in point, the 1968 film The Man Who Lies which features a wonderful performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant. I’ve always felt a little chilly towards Trintignant – an excellent actor, but I’ve only ever seen him playing intensely serious, sometimes tortured characters, films such as The Great Silence, My Night at Maud's, The Conformist, Desert of the Tartars, Three Colors Red. By contrast, his performance in The Man Who Lies, expertly playing as the title suggests an unreliable narrator has some superb witty, even mischievous touches, like a moment where he absentmindedly picks up a discarded bra and almost leaves the scene with it before realizing…