François Truffaut, Liberal Filmmaker

By Richard Brody, The New Yorker

30 March 14

ne of the big events of the spring is the complete retrospective of the films of François Truffaut that begins today at Film Forum and runs through April 17th. It’s a welcome chance to see some great movies that are also very rare (including the ones that I consider Truffaut’s best work, “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me” and “The Green Room”), and to revisit inexhaustible classics like his first feature, “The 400 Blows,” and others that, for all their obvious flaws, pack potent if esoteric pleasures, such as “Bed and Board.”

That 1970 movie is the fourth film in the Antoine Doinel cycle, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut’s quasi-alter-ego. It offers a wealth of cinephilic delights—open mysteries, references, and homages—that, for those who pick up on them, have the disruptive power of stickers placed on a painting or radios turned on at a concert.

The story involves the married Doinel, a young adult living in a modest apartment with his wife, Christine (played by Claude Jade, as in the film’s predecessor, the 1968 comedy “Stolen Kisses”). At first, he works dyeing flowers for a florist in the courtyard of the building where they live. That courtyard, with its teeming, peculiar, dubious, and flirtatious flux of encounters, observations, and banter, is a reprise of one of the great courtyards of cinema history, the one seen in Jean Renoir’s “The Crime of Monsieur Lange,” from 1935. In its hearty populism, the courtyard represents an ideal of a voluntary people’s republic, a sort of private-property commune that both looks back to the Popular Front dreams of Renoir’s prime and stands as a reproach to the Marxist orthodoxies that had come to the fore in the years after 1968.

The filmmaker who fell hardest for those orthodoxies was Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut’s longtime friend who, by the time of “Bed and Board,” had drawn away from him. Their relationship would soon, famously, break into acrimony that became public after Truffaut’s death, with the release of his correspondence. In “Bed and Board,” Truffaut winks tenderly and longingly at his friend through the movie’s casting, notably of the antic Middle European Ernest Menzer, who was a frequent presence in Godard’s films during the sixties; the bulldog-faced actor and novelist Daniel Boulanger, who played a police detective in “Breathless”; and the grand actress Danièle Delorme (appearing under the pseudonym of her birth name, Danièle Girard), who had a great bit part in “Band of Outsiders.”

The movie features other cinephilic nods, including a phone call placed to Jean Eustache; the presence of the filmmaker Jacques Robiolles in a recurring part; a double for Jacques Tati—or, rather, for his iconic character Monsieur Hulot—on a subway platform; and the bumptious American (Bill Kearns) from Tati’s “Playtime.” But the most personal cinematic reference features Doinel writing an autobiographical novel, over which his wife criticizes him for dragging his parents’ name through the mud. The story of the aspiring autobiographical artist with a young child and facing a domestic crisis of infidelity is itself an autobiographical chapter from Truffaut’s life, a story from a decade earlier that he grafted onto the sociopolitical and cinematic world of 1970.

Many of Truffaut’s films from that time reflect—or, rather, refract—the politics of the day in terms of the filmmaker’s distinctive range of concerns, the first of which is the raising and schooling of children, and the way that the private and public realms intersect in their lives. “The 400 Blows,” from 1959, is about a neglected child searching for a place in the world, but it’s also, in effect, a petty-crime story, of the sort that might merit a line in a newspaper, in which the chronological story seems like an inverted flashback. Young Antoine Doinel’s misdeed becomes a crime only due to appallingly harsh parenting. Once he falls into the hands of the law, social services and a child psychologist are involved, and it’s as if the events of the film are the information that well-meaning officials need but, with their methods, won’t get.

With “The Wild Child,” from 1970, Truffaut explicitly makes education his subject, and casts himself as the patiently humane early-nineteenth-century educator, a sharp contrast with the alternately harsh and cold teachers seen in “The 400 Blows.” But the linchpin of Truffaut’s career, as much aesthetically as politically, is the 1972 film “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me” (“Une Belle Fille Comme Moi,” also called “Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me,” the title of the Henry Farrell novel on which it’s based).

In the film, a social scientist (André Dussollier) conducts a series of interviews with a woman who has been convicted of murder. His subject is the criminal mind, but in the course of his studies he becomes ensnared in her self-serving plot. The movie is an uproarious, unstrung comedy, featuring a wide range of easy marks—men who want her, and on whom she preys. Its subject is power itself, as wielded by a woman who was the victim of a cruelly abusive father, one who makes the indifferent father in “The 400 Blows” look positively Park Slope. The dramatic underpinning of the comedy is a short and straight line between the horrors that she endured as a child and those that she inflicted as a grownup.

It’s no coincidence that the Truffaut series at Film Forum directly follows a complete retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock, of course, entered the canon through the critical exertions of Truffaut, Godard, and company at Cahiers du Cinéma in the nineteen-fifties. In the sixties, Truffaut spent three years (and sacrificed movie-making opportunities) working on the classic book of interviews with Hitchcock. Where Hitchcock saw evil in metaphysical terms, Truffaut filmed it in psychological terms, as the result of childhood miseries. He recognized it as cinematic meat (and, for that matter, dessert) but also as a societal poison. Interrupting the circulation of that poison as it flows from generation to generation became one of his key subjects, as in “Small Change,” from 1976, a lyrical comedy about children that has as its crucial moral presence a teacher (played by Jean-François Stévenin) whose sensitive attention to his students is a response to his own rough childhood.

At the same time, Truffaut was, cinematically, an erotic obsessive. He was, to put it bluntly, a leg man: the beginning of “Bed and Board” features close-ups on Christine’s legs; his 1964 film “The Soft Skin” finds the male protagonist suggesting to his lover that she change her blue jeans for a dress; and his last film, “Confidentially Yours,” features a real-estate agent whose basement office gives him a prime view of the legs of women passers-by. These obsessions reached an artistic crescendo with “The Man Who Loved Women.” There, the erotomaniac, played by Charles Denner, is as much Cherubino as Don Giovanni—(almost) every woman makes his heart beat faster—but he has a fetishistic affinity for traditional fashion and traditional reserve. He restores a manner of well-being through writing his erotic memoirs, which defy the petty moralism of an older generation of publishers but find favor with a younger editor (Brigitte Fossey) who fights for it—and for him.

It suddenly seems plausible to consider much of Truffaut’s work to be essentially political in its emphasis on the connection between intimate agonies and public disasters, between the delightful depiction of horrors and the pleasure of a life insulated from them, between the pliable institutions of an enlightened social order and the private pursuit of the deepest obsessions.

Truffaut was a liberal filmmaker in the best way: his distinctive sense of life is embodied in a distinctive cinematic aesthetic, characterized by a blend of the tight and the loose, a precise point-of-view-centered vision and a world-embracing, generous sweep of pan shots, a contrast between the private inner visions and the flow of inner discourse that is ready to be released to the world in writing or as art. Both the style and the idea influenced other filmmakers of a similar temperament, such as Paul Mazursky, Woody Allen, and Robert Benton. There’s something essentially Truffaldian about some of Spike Lee’s movies, from “She’s Gotta Have It” to “Red Hook Summer,” and in Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends.”

Truffaut died in 1984, at the age of fifty-two; his last feature, “Confidentially Yours”—a story of local corruption as a marker of sexual frustration, crime as a cockblocker—takes his political hints even further. The films that he didn’t live to make in the newly liberated age of Mitterrand—the President of France from 1981 to 1995, in which time the French New Wave became the center of the industry and the heroes of French culture—may well have pushed his aesthetic, and his world view, to new and self-challenging extremes, which, themselves, may have exerted an even more powerful and conspicuous influence on new filmmakers.