The films of François Truffaut: David Walsh reviews a program of the filmmaker's works at the Detroit Film Theatre
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The films of François Truffaut
David Walsh reviews a program of the filmmaker's works at the Detroit
Film Theatre
25 October 1999
As part of its autumn-winter schedule the Detroit Film Theatre at the
Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting all 21 of French filmmaker
François
Truffaut's feature films, two of his shorts and a documentary about his
life
and career. The DFT program, part of a national tour of the Truffaut
works, is entirely welcome and gives viewers the opportunity to evaluate
the work of a significant postwar film director.
Born in 1932, Truffaut first came to prominence in the mid-1950s as an
iconoclastic film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, the noted French film
journal. Around this publication, edited by André Bazin, gathered a
number of those—including Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,
Erich Rohmer and Jacques Rivette—who would be identified at the end
of the decade and the beginning of the next with the movement known as
the New Wave ( La Nouvelle Vague). In 1959, 24 French directors
made their first features, followed by 43 more the next year.
A number of Truffaut's works are permanent features of the film
landscape of the 1950s and 1960s, including The Four Hundred Blows
(1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960) Jules and Jim (1962) and The
Soft Skin (1964). I don't know that any of his later films had the
impact
those did, although Stolen Kisses (1968), The Wild Child (1970) Day
for Night (1973), Small Change (1975) and The Last Metro (1980),
among others, certainly found receptive audiences. Truffaut was only 52
years old when he died from a brain tumor in 1984.
As an artist he cuts an odd figure. Despite its many pleasurable and
insightful moments, his body of work as a whole fails to leave a deep
and
lasting impression. One staunch defender (Don Allen in Finally Truffaut,
1994) perhaps says more than he wants to when he observes that “A
common reaction to Truffaut's films is a sense of anticlimax.”
Remarkably, another sympathetic critic (James Monaco in Cinema: A
Critical Dictionary, 1980) expresses the same thought: “It was a
critical
commonplace in the 60s ... that both reviewers and audiences were
always vaguely disappointed with a new Truffaut film.”
In fact, when one takes into account Truffaut's intelligence and
sensitivity,
his encyclopedic film knowledge (he claimed to have seen 4,000 films
between 1940 and 1955, many of them repeatedly) as well as his
grounding in literature, and his obvious skills as a director, his work
does
present itself to a considerable degree as a disappointment.
At their best Truffaut's films possess many positive qualities—lightness
and informality, tenderness, sensuality, the personal touch. Positive,
but
perhaps not enough to sustain an artist in complex and difficult times.
Particularly when they seem at least as much the result of a conscious
plan to exclude certain human problems—specifically the problems of
social organization—from consideration as they do the outpouring of a
spontaneously lyrical personality. One almost always has the feeling
that
Truffaut has limited himself to the insubstantial as part of a larger
artistic
and intellectual scheme. Monaco admits as much, suggesting that we
need to accept “Truffaut's intentionally limited spectrum of concerns.”
The films
In The Four Hundred Blows, Truffaut's first and one of his finest works,
he transformed aspects of his own unhappy childhood into fiction. In the
film a Parisian youth, Antoine Doinel, tries to get by in the face of
his
parents' neglect or indifference. Petty crime leads him into trouble
with
the law and a stay in a detention center. He escapes, and the joyous
moment when he rushes, arms open, toward the sea, savoring his
freedom, is captured by Truffaut in a memorable freeze frame.
There are some lovely moments in this film. It has the flavor and pathos
of life. Here, in beautiful black-and-white, is Paris in the 1950s,
family
life, adolescence, rebellion. And the grimness of lower middle class
existence and captivity in various forms. And the indefinable yearning
for
something. The film protests against cruelty to children, even cruelty
of a
largely accidental and unconscious kind. The film is also blessed with
an
almost flawless performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's younger
self. The Four Hundred Blows is an enduring and authentic work.
There are troubling aspects, however, even to this film. For one thing,
the
director can't entirely seem to make up his mind about its overall tone.
More precisely, he seems resolved not to imbue it with a tragic or
semi-tragic coloring. The work at times has an inappropriate lightness,
inappropriate from the point of view of its own internal logic.
Antoine's
condition is genuinely sad and desperate. Whatever happens to him in the
short-term, he has to be scarred by the emotional abuse. This is not my
projection; after all, Truffaut called his first feature The Four
Hundred
Blows, not The Two Hundred Blows and The Two Hundred Amusing
Little Incidents. Too often the director pulls himself up short, as if
aware
of the natural drift of the work, and undercuts his critique of
Antoine's
circumstances with a joke, a sight gag, a shrug. At those moments, it
seems to me, Truffaut is really saying: “Oh no you don't, you're not
going
to catch me indicting society as a whole.”
Determinism is indispensable in art. Sustained unhappiness which is not
shown to be necessary, rooted somehow in the structure of things, has a
weakened impact because it fails to make a point of contact with the
spectator's own, for the most part unconscious intuition that life is
wretchedly and potentially tragically organized. Without provoking that
convulsive mental state in which one thinks simultaneously, This had to
happen! This shouldn't have happened!, there is no real tragedy.
Truffaut, for a variety of historical and ideological reasons, chose to
reject this sort of determinism. As a result the tragic quality is all
too
frequently either absent in his work where the need for it is felt, as
in
certain moments in The Four Hundred Blows (and perhaps The Last
Metro), or, more often, feels injected from the outside, arbitrary,
histrionic (as in Jules and Jim, The Soft Skin and The Woman Next
Door, among others).
There is another problem associated with The Four Hundred Blows that
perhaps speaks as well to a larger issue. Truffaut was born as “the
result
of an unwanted and illegitimate pregnancy” ( François Truffaut, Diana
Holmes and Robert Ingram, 1998) His mother, Janine de Montferrand,
came from an aristocratic family; 21 months after her son's birth she
married Roland Truffaut, an architect's assistant. (As a teenager
François
discovered that Roland was not his biological father.) The future film
director spent his early years shuttling between grandmothers. When his
maternal grandmother died in 1942, he came to live with Janine and
Roland Truffaut in a small Paris apartment. His mother “scarcely
tolerated him and his father was kind but weak and preoccupied.”
This is the period in his life fictionally worked over in The Four
Hundred
Blows, transposed to the late 1950s when Truffaut was actually shooting
his film. In 1942 a more general unhappiness, of course, overshadowed
the entire population of Paris. Northern France, including the capital
city,
was occupied by Hitler's forces. Resistance was met with arrest, torture
and, frequently, execution. There were also considerable material
shortages and economic hardship.
In retrospect I find it remarkable that Truffaut managed to set his
story in
the 1950s without making any apparent allowance for these facts. It
does suggest a special kind of blindness to have ignored the possibility
that the conditions of German occupation—carrying with them a
continuous threat of repression and brutality—might have added to the
tension and psychic discomfort even in a petty-bourgeois household
removed from direct involvement in the events, and thus have had an
impact on the texture of his childhood.
Instead Truffaut preferred simply to point an accusing finger at his
parents, especially his mother, as the source of all his unhappiness.
(He
chose, in his fictionalized version, to discount entirely as well the
intense
psychological and social pressures someone like Janine, from a
respectable Catholic family, must have come under in 1932 as an unwed
mother.) One can find in this an unpleasant dose of self-absorption and
self-pity. Beyond that, it reveals a determination to exclude historical
and
social processes from any explanation of human behavior; more
precisely, I would argue, it indicates the director's implicit
identification of
any consideration of these processes with the official “Left”—i.e.,
Stalinism—and its artistic crudities.
These two related tendencies—which manifest themselves as the inability
to find the right tone, or to integrate successfully conflicting
influences and
styles: French “poetic realism,” Hitchcock, Italian Neo-realism,
Bresson,
Hollywood film noir, etc., and a deliberate slightness and narrowness of
subject matter—seem to me to make themselves felt in many of Truffaut's
films. (That so many Truffaut commentators make virtues out of these
tendencies is another problem entirely.)
Jules and Jim (1961), Truffaut's third feature, is habitually referred
to as
an “acknowledged” or “undeniable” masterpiece. This apparently relieves
the given commentator from explaining why it is any such thing. The film
involves two men, one German and one French, in love with the same
woman, Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau). Much jockeying for
position goes on between the two men, while Catherine flits back and
forth between them before finally settling on the German. Years later,
when the Frenchman shows signs of finally getting over her, she drives
her car, in which he's a passenger, off a bridge.
In my own view, Jules and Jim revealed Truffaut's feet of clay. I was
bored and irritated by the film when I saw it three decades ago and
bored and irritated by a recent viewing as well. For one thing, I've
never
had any sympathy for the Jeanne Moreau cult. In Jules and Jim the most
“enigmatic” actress of our time is at her most enigmatic. Women who
play at that are just about the least interesting members of their sex.
The most irksome thing about the film, however, is Truffaut's
intellectual
laziness. Rather than explaining any of the characters' obsessive
behavior,
he would have us simply accept it as part of the ineffable tapestry of
life.
Critic Andrew Sarris observed admiringly that the film expressed “a
brutal vision of love as a private war fought apart from the rules and
regulations of society.” Yes, and this is exactly what's wrong with it.
Love
is very much fought out within and through the rules and regulations of
society. It is never, in fact, entirely accidental or inexplicable.
Truffaut's own example stares one in the face. It is fascinating to note
that
just as his career as a director was getting going in 1957, he married
the
daughter of one of France's richest and most powerful film distributors.
Is
this to suggest, as certain of his enemies at the time claimed, that he
was
an opportunist who married with an eye to the main chance? Not at all.
But those qualities an individual finds irresistible at a given moment
are
inevitably bound up with a host of needs and impulses, including
socially-determined ones, which do present themselves for scrutiny.
In any event, these problems (and any serious form of self-criticism)
were
always a closed book to Truffaut. His vision of love and women
remained essentially shallow and adolescent throughout his artistic
life. All
the “meaningless vivacity” of Jules and Jim, as American critic Manny
Farber termed it, can't conceal its essential lack of coherence, drama
or
tension. The violent end, like nearly everything else in the film, is
forced
and unconvincing.
The Soft Skin is a study in adultery, based at least in part presumably
on
Truffaut's own experiences, including the break-up of his marriage. An
older man, a well-known writer, begins an affair with a young flight
attendant. They endure a variety of setbacks and humiliations in their
effort to spend time alone together. He falls head over heels in love
and
begins to reorganize his life. She informs him that for her it was not
such a
serious thing, and ends the relationship. His wife, who has meanwhile
discovered the affair, shoots him in a restaurant. Much of the film,
thankfully less grandiloquent than Jules and Jim, rings true. At least
until
the contrived denouement. Françoise Dorleac, a far warmer performer
than her sister Catherine Deneuve, plays the flight attendant; she died
tragically in a car crash in 1967.
Fahrenheit 451 (1966), based on a Ray Bradbury story, about a future
society in which all reading matter is banned and firefighters have the
job
of burning it, is a serious and moving work. Perhaps his unfamiliarity
with
the language—this is his only film in English—worked in Truffaut's
favor.
He has fewer opportunities, fortunately, to demonstrate French flair and
sophistication; there is less of the “Pourquoi pas?” attitudinizing. The
film
is a bit cold, but the director's vision of humane social relations and
his
commitment to knowledge and books feel entirely genuine. Fahrenheit
451 is also graced with Julie Christie in a double role.
Truffaut filmed Stolen Kisses in February and March 1968, only months
before the great general strike. Antoine Doinel makes a reappearance
(his third, counting Antoine and Colette, an endearing segment of Love
at Twenty [1962], which included contributions from five directors),
now 20 and dishonorably discharged from the army. The film follows his
various efforts at work and love. When it doesn't try too hard, Stolen
Kisses is genuinely charming, although Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine in all
the films) has already begun to grate on one's nerves. Michel Lonsdale
is
wonderful as the odious owner of a shoe store (nicknamed “The
Dinosaur” by his employees) who hires the services of the private
detective agency for which Antoine works to find out why he is so
disliked. The remarkable Delphine Seyrig is appealing as his wife who
has the most discreet and devastating approach to seduction.
In its own way the film expresses something of the spirit of 1968, at
least
refracted through the prism of Truffaut's particular concerns. During
filming he was involved in organizing protests against the DeGaulle
government's efforts to remove Henri Langlois, the legendary director of
the French Cinémathèque. After leading the successful struggle to retain
Langlois, Truffaut played a major role in closing down the Cannes Film
Festival in solidarity with the striking workers and students. (After an
early flirtation with the political right, Truffaut moved leftward in
the
1960s and early 1970s. He then settled back in the reformist milieu,
eventually sympathizing with elements within the Socialist Party and the
CFDT trade union.)
The Wild Child (1969) was Truffaut's last film of the 1960s and perhaps
his last film of genuine interest. The child of the title is Victor of
the
Aveyron, an historical figure, who was found in the forest in France
around 1800. Unwanted by his parents who apparently left him to die,
Victor grew up like an animal. At the beginning of Truffaut's film
peasants
hunt him down; he is naked, filthy and unable to speak. Dr. Itard (well
played by Truffaut) takes on the challenge of educating him. Itard's
difficult and frustrating effort to lead Victor intellectually out of
the woods
is conveyed with sensitivity and compassion.
Truffaut made the film at least in part to argue against various forms
of
libertarianism and anti-intellectualism so much in vogue in radical
circles in
France and elsewhere at the time. In The Wild Child he suggests that
civilization, despite its discontents and its costs, has a value, as do
education and rational thought. Victor is not deaf, but when he first
lives
with Itard, he doesn't respond to the sound of human voices. They have
no significance for him. As he learns something about the society of
human beings and implicates himself in its activities, he sees and
experiences the world differently. I think Truffaut's purpose here is
entirely legitimate and the work, despite being saddled with a
self-consciously Bressonian austerity, still retains its essential
eloquence.
Truffaut made another 11 films, but they are of steadily declining
interest,
in my view. The last two episodes of the Antoine Doinel cycle, Bed and
Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1978), are quite weak, the latter
pretty insufferable. Love on the Run is French filmmaking at its
worst—pretty, trivial and pleased with itself. Two English Girls (1971),
which owes something to the history of the Brontë sisters, and The Story
of Adèle H (1975), based on the life of Victor Hugo's daughter, are
overwrought and unmoving contrivances.
By the time he made Day for Night (1973), a story about the making of
a film, Truffaut could pose as a serious question, “Are films more
important than life?” The film manages to treat in a cliched fashion
nearly
every one of the least important and least interesting aspects of
artistic
production. I would urge anyone who cherishes this amusing and
complacent little work to compare it with R.W. Fassbinder's Beware the
Holy Whore or Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees, films that
actually say something about art and life and society. The Last Metro is
a sincere effort to deal with the Second World War and the German
occupation of Paris, but it seems fairly slight and uninvolving.
The Woman Next Door and Confidentially Yours (1982), despite the
radiant presence of Fanny Ardant, with whom Truffaut was now
romantically involved, are distinctly “off.” The latter, Truffaut's last
film, is
quite odd. A supposed film noir, Confidentially Yours fails on nearly
every level. Not only is there a lack of chemistry between Ardant and
Jean-Louis Trintignant, playing the boss whom she clears of a murder
charge, the two don't appear to be performing in the same film. All in
all,
Truffaut artistically came to a sad end.
France in the 1950s
It might be useful to place some of Truffaut's shortcomings in their
historical context. In his case, this amounts to asking: what sort of
social
and intellectual circumstances encourage an artist to restrict himself
to the
insubstantial, and even make it possible for that self-limitation to
appear
as a liberating stance?
For artists the situation in France was difficult in the 1950s as it was
for
artists everywhere. The type of anticommunist witch-hunts that took
place in the US did not occur there, but the Cold War had divided
cultural life and opinion into hostile camps, the Stalinist faction,
claiming
to speak for “the people” and “progress” and defense of the “socialist”
bloc, and the pro-imperialist “democratic” camp.
This presented Truffaut and every other French artist, whether they were
aware of it or not, with a set of nearly impossible ideological and
moral
alternatives. Those, like André Breton and a relatively small number of
others, who considered themselves opponents of both Stalinism and
capitalism were few in number and, by the mid-1950s, isolated and
somewhat demoralized.
Truffaut entered into battle as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma as an
opponent of what was termed the “tradition of quality” in French cinema,
with its somewhat labored “psychological realism,” associated in
particular with directors Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, René
Clément and Yves Allégret, and scenarists Jean Aurenche and Pierre
Bost. In his famous article, “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”
(1954), he criticized this trend for a disparate collection of sins: for
its
academicism, for its contemptuous superiority toward its characters, for
its facile anti-bourgeois views, including a taste for blasphemy and a
hatred of family, for its underestimation of cinema as a medium, and
more.
To the tedious “tradition of quality,” Truffaut posed as a counterweight
the director as “author,” and “poetic realism.” Truffaut praised a group
of
directors, including Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques
Becker, Max Ophuls and Jacques Tati, who, he insisted, made cinema,
not mediocre literary adaptations. (Truffaut conveniently forgot,
however,
that much of the1930s' poetic realism he so admired, in the work of
Renoir and Jean Vigo, for example—with all its strengths and
weaknesses—was bound up with the revolutionary strivings of the time,
which reached their high point in the massive general strike of May-June
1936 and which were betrayed through the medium of the Popular Front
government.)
The Cahiers group was also renowned for its championing of Hollywood
directors—denigrated as commercial hacks by most French left
intellectuals—including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford,
Raoul Walsh, Samuel Fuller and others. They were even nicknamed the
“hitchcockohawksiens.”
Truffaut and the others were no doubt correct in many, although not all,
of their arguments, but there is something limited and distorted about
the
entire debate. Without taking into account the catastrophic role played
by
Stalinism it is impossible to comprehend how a revolt of younger artists
and critics against official culture, or one wing of it, could take the
form of
a rebellion against the “Left.”
The recent biography of Truffaut by Antoine de Baecque and Serge
Toubiana ( Truffaut, 1999) provides some flavor of the confused
situation that prevailed in the early and middle 1950s. It is worth
citing a
couple of paragraphs:
“François Truffaut's writing style, press campaigns, and taste for
provocation were typical of the literary right. It's no coincidence,
since
the papers he wrote for ... his personal contacts, and his
pamphleteering
style all suggest rebellion against academicism and the culturally
dominant
left-wing intellectual circles of the postwar period. Polemics raged
between the two camps in the fifties, even if the Communist,
social-Christian, humanist left vastly outnumbered the right.... Jacques
Laurent was the leading [right-wing] ‘hussar,' but he founded La
Parisienne and accepted editorialship of Arts under the banner of
‘political noncommitment.' He expressed this objective in an editorial
in
the first issue of La Parisienne, dated January 1953: ‘Literature has
become a means to an end. It is disapproved of as soon as it is anything
other than a means'; he wished to sever the ties between literature and
politics—that is, between literary circles and left-wing activism.
“This was a cause François Truffaut could identify with. In Cahiers, he
fought against supporters of ‘films with a message,' praising form and
mise-en-scène [direction] over the screenplay. But this cause was
considered reactionary; lack of political commitment was associated with
individualism, egoism, formal innovation, dandyism—so many attitudes
denounced as impeding the values of cultural, political, and moral
reconstruction inspired by the Liberation.”
What a mess! It becomes less difficult to see how Truffaut lost his way
on some of these issues, or never found it in the first place, and,
specifically, why he so persistently associated the analysis of social
reality
in art with heavy-handedness and worse. As the material circumstances
of his life improved, of course, this hostility to making sense of
social life
became increasingly anchored in self-interest.
Truffaut's artistic life represents something of a cautionary tale.
Whatever
the external circumstances, the artist who chooses with a certain degree
of calculation to explore only those aspects of life that seem most
appealing to him, most likely to yield their secrets, has not studied
“the
human problem in depth in all its forms” (Breton). Truffaut's films
deserve
to be seen and their real merits appreciated, but most viewers, if they
are
honest with themselves, will find on their lips at some point that
terrible
word: “Disappointing!”
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