Truffaut: l’homme qui aimait les films
With the anniversary of Truffaut’s untimely death coming up next week, and Godard’s still recent news, I thought I would devote some inches to the director I have always preferred of the two.
Truffaut, like Welles, was unfortunate in producing his most critically lauded films at the start of his career: Les quatre cents coups, Tirez sur le pianiste, Jules et Jim. In later films he sometimes seemed to be recycling himself, and the Antoine Doinel sequels reinforced this impression. He often seemed to be punching below his weight, failing to live up to his idols, not least Hitchcock. His reliance on literary sources lent his scripts a bookish quality, with an over-reliance on voiceover. Viewing them again in maturity, though, it is the passion for film making and love of life that comes through the most in his work.
His fourth feature, one of a number re-released in 2011, was la peau douce (Silken Skin) from 1964, in which Truffaut assayed his first tale of marital infidelity, a subject to which he would return most notably in la femme d’à côté (1981). That and its somewhat melodramatic conclusion make it seem in retrospect more typical of the films of contemporary ‘New-Waver’ Claude Chabrol.
The story concerns an established man of letters, married to a beautiful woman and blessed with a sweet ten-year-old daughter, who throws it all away for a fling with an air hostess that swiftly becomes an obsession. The object of desire is played by Françoise Dorléac, the more kittenish sister of Catherine Deneuve. She was the perfect successor to Marie Dubois (Tirez sur le pianiste) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim), for like them she had youthful vivacity and mischievousness written across her features, while at the same time incarnating something of that womanly remoteness that men have found so bewitching.
So much for Dorléac; the weakness of the film for me is Jean Desailly’s thin-lipped and bookish errant husband, every inch the intellectual out of his depth but not so convincing a source of passion for a young and attractive air hostess. Still, this is well worth a look for conveying a sense of impending doom in its portrait of a safe bourgeois marriage gone horribly wrong, and for its elegant black and white cinematography (from here on Truffaut’s films lost much of that Nouvelle Vague cheap and cheerful spontaneity, even abandoning black and white for all but a couple of later works).
Another Truffaut film re-released in 2011, and shown recently by Ipswich Film Society, is Day for Night (la nuit américaine) (1973), the best film ever made about the highs and lows of making a movie, with Truffaut playing its embattled director, Jacqueline Bisset the leading lady, Jean-Pierre Aumont her philandering co-star, and Truffaut proxy Jean-Pierre Léaud an intense, awestruck debutant. All of life is here, both comedy and tragedy, and in its sense of a family of actors being brought together on a film set, in its anecdotal, slightly self-absorbed quality, and its wry look at ‘why we do what we do’, it could have been made by Woody Allen.
