Rather like the sudden revelation of a maliciously grinning face, finally visible through the detail of a drawing, François Truffaut's A Gorgeous Bird Like Me … ends on an unexpectedly sardonic joke…. The ending hints at a pattern to the contest of styles between Stanislas and Camille—parodies of reason and instinct, with the bias towards an anti-intellectual buffoonery in the cardboard caricature of the sociologist. But the rest of the film is too busy with repetitive and faintly parasitic gags to make much of the competition, and the pattern is meaninglessly scrambled by some casual dislocations….

In place of the moral righteousness of the heroine of The Bride Wore Black, A Gorgeous Bird Like Me celebrates Camille's singleminded pursuit of a good time. Where Stanislas fails to see the wood for the trees, his own confusion of motives for the case history he finds in Camille, the...