Ladies' man

Taking stock of Truffaut

Last week, a film-studies graduate requested some life advice for when he acquires his master's degree. I'd just finished Truffaut: A Biography, by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana (Knopf, $30), so I overwhelmed him by proposing filmmaker François Truffaut's schedule of self-improvement: three movies a day, three books a week. Truffaut, an auto-didact school dropout, stuck to his rigorous plan. He claimed to have seen 4000 movies, and he read voraciously, from devouring American detective novels to studying James and Proust.

Years before this first biography, I had much related to the filmmaker's early life. As I did, François loathed school, provoked his dullard teachers, made terrible grades, but passionately loved books and movies (especially American genre films) and could never get enough of either. Also, underneath the rudeness and anarchy was a good kid who could be unleashed and tamed if someone in authority just understood. When I was an adolescent, that's the way I felt too.

After that, the resemblances end. Who would want to repeat Truffaut's wounded, dispirited Dickensian childhood? Much of it was spent living on the dole in Paris with a friend, Robert Lachenay, instead of with his parents, who barely cared that he existed. His terrible story was put on screen in Truffaut's famous first feature, The 400 Blows, in which the filmmaker's autobiographical alter ego, Antoine Doinel, ends up (his parents sign him in) at a no-way-out reform school. All true, and there were days in jail, and in solitary confinement, and several suicide attempts.

Oh, but Truffaut's love life! At age 14, he had a mistress. Later, he did the impossible: as a film critic in the 1950s, he got laid regularly. He wrote movie reviews, and he also got chicks! (Am I envious? You bet. In the 1990s, any teen drummer in a garage band gets more action in one night than the whole National Society of Film Critics does in a year in the dark.)

And when he became a film director? Truffaut fell in love while picking actresses and consummated his amour while filming. Truffaut is an amazing record of casting-couch cinema, movie after movie after movie, with Truffaut inevitably bedding down his leading lady. Among his conquests: Jeanne Moreau for Jules and Jim, Françoise Dorléac for The Soft Skin, Julie Christie for Fahrenheit 451, Catherine Deneuve for Mississippi Mermaid, Jacqueline Bisset for Day for Night, Fanny Ardant for The Woman Next Door. He slept with 17-year-old Marie-France Pisier, the star of Love at Twenty, and almost wed 19-year-old Claude Jade, co-star of Stolen Kisses. (He was already married at the time, to Madeleine Morgenstern, mother of his two daughters.)

Truffaut's nocturnal philosophy: "I wouldn't consider having dinner with a man. I have this in common with Hitler and Sartre. I can't stand male companionship in the evening. For me, the evening means private life, in a private place."

Truffaut offers the production circumstances of the director's filmmaking, movie by movie, but it stays away from critiquing or analyzing. (The best critical study in English remains Annette Insdorf's François Truffaut.) Instead, the book speeds through Truffaut's life in an interesting and well-researched if not particularly profound way. Although it's excellent at describing Truffaut's political shift from a kind of anarchist right to a suspicious-of-politicians liberalism, a lukewarm supporter of Mitterrand, Truffaut fails mightily at placing the filmmaker among his Cahiers du Cinéma pals: André Bazin, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol, Godard. This group started a revolution, the French New Wave, and you don't feel it in this book. I especially missed an obviously important chapter just about the friendship, and its long unraveling, between Truffaut and Godard, with all its aesthetic, political, and cultural implications.

How important a filmmaker is Truffaut? Again, Truffaut the bio doesn't get involved. My feeling is that the jury is out a bit. Everyone loves Day for Night and The Wild Child. However, the beloved early features -- The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim -- never feel quite as fresh as when they were released. Nobody except Orson Welles seems to have been so exuberant about making movies, clutching a camera and swinging it to and fro to tell stories. But we most need to revisit the unpopular, melancholic movies, The Soft Skin and Mississippi Mermaid, and also those that seemed tired, stilted, mordant the first time around: The Green Room, Bed and Board, Two English Girls.

What I suspect: the complete Truffaut (he died in 1984 of a brain tumor) will reveal the most essential, versatile French filmmaker since World War II.

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There was, for skeptical me, too much ditsy humor from local TV types at the podium, and the white gal's Whoopi MC, Marjorie Clapprood, chose an inappropriately post-feminist persona for this appealingly feminist evening. But no doubt about it: Women in Film & Video New England's 1999 Image Awards for Vision & Excellence was a smashing success a week ago Monday, a girls' night out of ballroom glamor and media excitement at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Congratulations to a worthy organization for pulling it off, and with such pizzazz!