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.
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!