BrandonHabes’s review published on Letterboxd:
Dedicated to Renoir, stylized like Hitchcock, this gritty, shifty, noir-laden steamer is yet another example of Truffaut’s fascination with the American B-movie. Ice queen Catherine Deneuve pairs up with new wave king Jean-Paul Belmondo, together forming a seductive web of burglary, murder, blackmail and deception. You know, classic noir stuff, only not as muddled but still as tedious. Thrills of sexual obsession call forth Buñuel, visual iconography ventures into Hitchcock, and there’s even a splash of PHANTOM THREAD (2017) masochism at play that turns sickness into arousal, murder into romance. It’s an icy, pitch-black ode to classical genre pictures, the kind Truffaut adored and sought to emulate throughout his career. Much more cynical, too, than the Antoine Doinel series, which I’ve noticed is pretty typical of Truffaut when he seeks to imitate Hitchcock.
The premise may be totally weird and absurd, speaking to the lengths we go to mask our loneliness, but one thing is for certain: Deneuve and Belmondo are one hot item 🔥🔥🔥