The more films I watch with Bernadette Lafont, the more I appreciate her: of course she was an extremely sexy woman (here, she even looks good in a bug exterminator's uniform!), but beyond that she had a special wit and playfulness about her that set her apart from all others; probably only she could make the character she plays here fascinating and even endearing instead of repellent. Truffaut makes inventive use of flashbacks, and just when the film is beginning to feel a little repetitive, he starts springing a series of surprises on the viewer, leading up to an almost perfect ending. André Dussollier and Anne Kreis make very promising film debuts. *** out of 4.

I must begin by admitting my headlong love for Truffaut's work. As connoisseur ratings go, this might not be his best film (Jules et Jim, Argent de Poche, Le Dernier Metro, Baisers Volés, Tirez sur le Pianiste, and Les 400 Coups are all at least as good and possibly better) but there is just so much life, tongue in cheek, unbridled pleasure in directing and in treating life as art, and the acting is so deceptively simple that I have to say this is probably my most favourite film by one of my most favourite directors. The initial sequence with the young dilettante's flatulent and cursing father kicking her rugby style sets the tone for the rest of the film, consistently pitting the stupidity of the male against the instinctive and openly unscrupulous intelligence of the leading female (there is hope yet in the typist but she is not the one all the men fall in love with...) Glorious comic touches sprinkle the film but if I had to select the cherry on this cake that would be the sequence where Denner, the rat exterminator, is waiting for Bernadette to come back from her visit to the singer. Look at how he tries to establish where the racing cars are that he hears but cannot see on the open road! Oh you must see this!

Pastiches in the noble sense of the word, Truffaut's B movies, semi—serious and intelligent, are constructed on an unusual report—the delicious contrast between the finesse and the brutality/ brusqueness. Finesse of conception, of treatment, of methods; brutality and brusqueness of the primary literary sources—testifying of Truffaut's decadent attraction towards the brutal and the sordid (Truffaut himself had a rather naughty adolescence, and his physiognomy shows a certain human stuff, there are Lombrosian traces that somehow are at odds or seem to contradict his reputation of a gentle, emasculate human being and his high and refined intellectuality; he obviously wanted to look like the angelic leads—Léaud …;he did not).From this juxtaposing of finesse and brutality issue a nonchalance and a delicious contrast. The respective pictures are not _epigone flicks, they are not pastiches in this pejorative sense, they are not derivative—but ingenious, ironic, and contradictory. They are also highly cultured products—the same vacuum pomp found at Godard as well (with an entire different function in Truffaut's cinema, etc.). This artificiality might seem at first disconcerting; yet it is of a Hitchcockian efficiency, and strictly functional. This artificiality bears values—several values, either human, personal or artistic. It can not be dismissed as a defect. It is part of the charm.

Like Michael Winner, Truffaut thinks a feminist movie would be about a sexually promiscuous woman who turns the tables on a serious of idiotic men who are so caricatured that they bear little relation to the real oppressors facing women at this time, especially in institutionally misogynistic France. I should really like this film, it has everything I wanted - directed by the maker of my three desert-island films; magic realism; a Chinese-whispers narrative structure; bawdy comedy; grotesques; superb performances. Bernadette Lafont is sprightly in the lead role, escaping all the traps men lay for her (including her director). Andre Dussolier is sensational is his first role as the intellectual, spectacles-wearing professor who can't see beyond his own nose, and Guy Marchand is hilarious as a spectacularly vain rock star. All these things are good. The film isn't. Go figure.