The director strikes back

The empire of the great François Truffaut

by Peter Keough

"SHOOT THE DIRECTOR: THE FILMS OF FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT," At the Brattle Theatre, Thursdays through June 17.

The way the new millennium is shaping up, François Truffaut will be remembered by future generations, if at all, as the French guy who co-starred with E.T. Or perhaps the upcoming release of The Phantom Menace is distorting my judgment. At any rate, for those who are nostalgic for movies made by, for, and about human beings, or for those unwilling to wait in line for the new George Lucas opus, I recommend "Shoot the Director: The Films of François Truffaut," which opens today (May 13) and runs Thursdays at the Brattle Theatre.

You will find that the New Wave looks newer than ever. Although dead for 15 years, Truffaut still seems more vital in his passion and integrity than any filmmaker who has emerged in the interim. As early as his 1957 short Les mistons (1957; May 20, preceding Jules & Jim), the then Cahiers du Cinéma film critic was putting into practice his faith in films as an auteur's medium and establishing the themes and obsessions that would distinguish his work and his life.

Bernadette, a beautiful girl on a bike, flies into a tracking camera, her long skirt blowing about her thighs, and the coy adult narrator reminisces about her impact on the burgeoning sexuality of himself and his clique of fellow pre-adolescent "brats" -- who are shown sniffing Bernadette's bicycle seat as she goes for a dip. "Too young to love Bernadette," the narrator notes, "we decided to hate and torment her." Later, though, as she plays tennis with her boyfriend and they gaze at her gams -- forever a leg man, Truffaut -- and docilely shag the errant balls, he admits, "We'd serve her forever for such moments."

And so the filmmaker would, the "her" being cinema as much as the eternally elusive feminine mystique that would forever tantalize and torment him. Not to mention his cinematic alter ego, Antoine Doinel, who was played in five films by Jean-Pierre Léaud in film's greatest fusion of actor, director, and role. Antoine's banishment from the womb begins with Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows (1959; May 13 at 3:45 and 7:45 p.m.), as the timid, barely adolescent delinquent -- who's guilty of playing hooky and stealing a typewriter but mostly of glimpsing his mother's infidelity -- finds himself in reform school. Escape brings him to the colder womb of the sea, and the most famous freeze frame in cinema history.

Truffaut, too, was cast into an unfamiliar element: the international fame that his debut and the movement it helped spawn created sucked him up like the centrifuge Antoine rides in one of his few moments of joy. Filmmaking allowed Truffaut to defy gravity but imposed its own imprisoning laws, which he toyed with in his next film, the generic mishmash -- film noir, screwball comedy, melodrama, what have you -- Shoot the Piano Player (1960; May 13 at 5:50 and 9:45 p.m.). Dour and winsome Charles Aznavour plays the musician of the title, a concert pianist who hides in the obscurity of a honky-tonk after the suicide of his first wife. But he's drawn back into life when his "wild beast" brothers involve him in crime. Life, though, proves as repetitious and artificial as the melody that is the hero's theme; he falls in love once more only to suffer again.

Despite some inspired moments -- an opening chase scene interrupted by a chat about love and marriage, a long tracking shot of a woman with a violin case that leads nowhere except, possibly, to Antoine Doinel's future wife, Christine -- Piano Player feels labored and contrived. Not so Truffaut's next film, and maybe his masterpiece, Jules & Jim (1961; May 20 at 4:15, 7, and 9 p.m.), which he adapted from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. Here he perfects the mixing of tone -- melancholy and mirth, pathos and play -- mishandled in the previous film, and he achieves his most fervent and ambiguous meditation on men, women, desire, and power.

The two pals of the title -- the Austrian Jules (the forever wounded Oskar Werner) and the French Jim (Henri Serre, who becomes tragic and charming once he shaves off his moustache) -- recognize desire and power when they see it frozen in the smile of an ancient statue in a friend's photograph. They travel immediately to the Adriatic island where the original is located, but they could have saved themselves the trip, as the smile is incarnated in the inscrutable Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, in her greatest performance). Jules decides to marry her, and that and the outbreak of hostilities between their two countries temporarily separates the two best friends.

The Great War, however, is just a passing annoyance compared to Catherine -- today's psychobabblists might label her with Borderline Personality Disorder or some such pathology. For her two lovers, she is, as Jules puts it, "not especially beautiful, or intelligent, or sincere; but a real woman." They haven't got a chance, but they, and Truffaut, make the most of it as their tale glides through the decades with such blithe whimsy and exquisite style that the missing span in the bridge comes as a surprise no matter how many times the film is seen.

Or remade, as Truffaut virtually did so 10 years later with the coldly moving Two English Girls (1971; June 10 at 7 p.m.), from another Roché novel. The triangle returns with the genders realigned and Jean-Pierre Léaud -- Antoine grown up, in period clothes and colorless -- awkwardly in the central position. He plays Claude, a spoiled bourgeois whom Anne (Kika Markham), a young aspiring English sculptress, takes a fancy to. Pygmalion-like, Anne tries to shape Claude into a beau for her younger sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter) -- in one telling scene, the two girls knead him between their backs in a childhood game called "the lemon squeeze." Claude is all too pliable, though, and when the starchy Muriel proves hard to get, he unhappily hooks up with Anne. Years pass: mediocre, alone, and irrelevant, Claude wanders through the Rodin sculpture garden searching the faces of English schoolgirls, wondering when his own face grew so old.

Those taken by Léaud's chubby features in The 400 Blows might wonder too. For better or worse, it's all on film, beginning with "Antoine & Colette" (1962; May 27 preceding Stolen Kisses), part of the portmanteau film Love at Twenty. A child no more, Doinel still is not old enough to love, but he seeks to fill the maternal void by stalking a comely neighbor (Marie-France Pisier), seeking to possess her by seducing her parents.

The strategy fails, but it doesn't stop Antoine from employing it again a few years later in Stolen Kisses (1968; May 27 at 5, 7:15, and 9:30 p.m.), with greater success. Truffaut, too, tries an old strategy -- the so-called "explosion of genres" that he employed in Shoot the Piano Player here gets better results. It's the most unambiguously delightful of his films. Dishonorably discharged from the military, Antoine juggles a series of odd jobs as he pursues his courtship of the diffident Christine (Claude Jade) and her genial parents. At last he finds steady work as an ineffectual gumshoe in a detective agency, and after being seduced by the wife of one of his clients (Delphine Seyrig as a shoe-shop owner, making Doinel's flights of romantic mania seem just another case of fetishism), he finds the backbone to betroth himself to his beloved.

The flightiness of Stolen Kisses, though, can't survive the routine and responsibilities of Bed and Board (1970; June 10 at 5 and 9:40 p.m.), which despite many pleasures is an unsatisfying study of dissatisfaction. At first the ménage of Antoine and Christine seems idyllic; he dyes carnations, she gives violin lessons, and they live above a courtyard of amusingly eccentric neighbors of the kind one sees only on TV. But impending parenthood makes Antoine antsy and ambitious.

He takes on a job at a hydraulic plant maneuvering model boats by remote control but is distracted from this grimly puerile pursuit by Kyoko, a Japanese woman who is the model of porcelain passivity. Christine tolerates this aberration -- she even gives him advice over the phone when he's bored on a dinner date -- but what she won't stand for is his conviction that he is a novelist. Revenge for an unhappy childhood, she insists, is not art.

Whether or not it's art, it does seem the pattern for a life. Nearly a decade later in Love on the Run (1979; June 17 at 5 and 9:40 p.m.), Antoine has published his novel, but he is also concluding his divorce from Christine. At the courthouse he's spotted by Colette, now a prosecutor, who amuses herself on a train trip by reading Antoine's autobiographical book. Meanwhile, Antoine tenuously wages an affair with the pert and headstrong Sabine (Dorothée), who may or may not be married to Colette's boyfriend. Flashbacks from the previous Antoine Doinel films seem more padding than poignance, but what redeems both Doinel and the film is, literally, a pastiche. His new novel is the tale of a man who puts together a torn-up photograph to find the face he is in love with.

Whether it's the stone icon in Jules & Jim or the ripped snapshot of Love on the Run, the female image for Truffaut is ever elusive and ineluctable, as is the consolation and the plague of the medium with which he conjures it. As respite, perhaps, from his more personal films, he reconfigured the image and his obsession with it in genre efforts.

He emulated his hero Hitchcock in The Soft Skin (1964; June 3 at 3 and 7:30 p.m.), a tale of infidelity and revenge whose cold surfaces and suffocating longing don't survive the preposterous melodrama of the ending or the fact that the protagonist looks like a gerbil. He emulated his rival Jean-Luc Godard in his adaptation of Ray Bradbury's minatory science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 (1966; June 3 at 5:15 and 9:45 p.m.). "There will be as many literary references," Truffaut wrote about the movie, "as in all of Jean-Luc's 11 films put together." That was just part of the problem with a sophomoric screed that, though slick to look at, is a big, blundering '60s cliché.

With the melodrama The Last Métro (1980; June 17 at 7 p.m.), one of the last of his pictures, the ailing filmmaker managed to demonstrate, once again, some of his genius. A dusty period piece set in occupied Paris, with Catherine Deneuve luminous as the wife of a Jewish dramatist who manages her husband's theater while he hides in the basement, and Gérard Depardieu beefy as the actor and Resistance fighter who vies for her heart, it's stymied by the couple's utter lack of chemistry. No matter -- the final scene is a trompe-l'oeil that overshadows any effect put out by Industrial Light and Magic. The means are the basic stuff of make-believe and life -- passion, pain, imagination, and wisdom.