Director Essentials: Francois Truffaut

 by Patrick Bromley

The father of the French New Wave!

There's probably no way to talk about Francois Truffaut or French cinema without coming off like a pretentious douche, so I'll just say this: he is and has been my favorite non-English filmmaker since I first saw Small Change in high school French class. A versatile and oft-underappreciated filmmaker (Quentin Tarantino himself calls Truffaut a "bumbling amateur" and compares him to Ed Wood) -- as well as a critic, screenwriter, and sometimes actor -- Truffaut's career lasted only 25 years; he died of a brain tumor in 1984 at the age of 52. At a time when Ridley Scott is making movies into his 80s and Clint Eastwood into his 90s, it's hard not to think of all the work we were denied by an older Truffaut. He's one of the true giants of the cinema.

If there are, as I believe, Truffaut people and Godard people, I am wholeheartedly a Truffaut Person.

1. The 400 Blows (1959)

Francois Truffaut didn't exactly explode onto the scene with his first film, because he was already a celebrated film critic who had made his name tearing down the establishment of the French film industry. That didn't make his autobiographical debut The 400 Blows any less revelatory, announcing him a serious filmmaker and basically kicking off the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The movie establishes Truffaut's style, which is self-aware and formally loose but primarily focused on emotion and humanity. I'd call it one of the best movies ever made except that I think the next movie on this list is even better. The 400 Blows became the first in a series of films to follow the main character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) throughout his life from adolescence to adulthood: the 1962 short Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1972), and Love on the Run (1979). Richard Linklater's Boyhood and the Before series both draw heavy inspiration from Truffaut's Doinel films.

2. Jules and Jim (1962)

Truffaut's most famous film -- and also his greatest -- is the story of two best friends (Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) and one woman (Jeanne Moreau) who fall in and out of love and partnerships over the course of 25 years. Few movies are this alive and exciting as they begin and as sad as they end. Jules and Jim perfectly captures the experience of being alive that way. The black and white widescreen cinematography is even more gorgeous here than it is in The 400 Blows and the score by Georges Delerue is one of the five best scores of all time. The more times I see this (I show it in class a couple times a semester) the more I realize it's one of my very favorites, a wonderful film about the promise of youth and the realities of adulthood. Of all his films, I'd argue that this one is the key to unlocking Truffaut.

3. The Soft Skin (1964)

I was conflicted about putting this one on the list because Truffaut revisited this kind of psychological romantic drama (RomDram) a few times over the course of his career and I couldn't decide which movie best represented his variations on a theme. I'm going with his fourth film The Soft Skin because, while it seems only slightly less autobiographical than a later work like The Man Who Loved Women, it feels influenced by Hitchcock, whom the director worshipped and had just interviewed extensively (as read in the collected book Hitchcock/Truffaut, later adapted into a documentary). It tells the story of an ordinary married man (Jean Desailly) who decides to leave his wife when he falls in love with a much younger flight attendant (Françoise Dorléac, the older sister of Catherine Deneuve). Though it was nominated for the Palme D'Or, The Soft Skin divided critics and was one of the director's least successful films at the box office, only gaining recognition in later years (its addition to the Criterion Collection didn't hurt). Wild that Truffaut was still a relatively young man when he made this one, as it feels like the work of an older filmmaker, one with a life lived of mistakes and regret.

4. The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Fuck Quentin Tarantino's opinion, this movie rules. Truffaut's most overtly Hitchcockian effort finds a newly married woman (Jeanne Moreau, reteaming with the director after Jules and Jim) vowing revenge on everyone responsible for gunning down her husband on their wedding day. From its dark premise to its icy approach to its attention to suspense to the way it slowly drips out information to the Bernard Hermann score, this is the closest Truffaut ever came to approximating Hitchcock (weird that Hitchcock isn't really one of my guys but acolytes like Truffaut and Brian De Palma totally are). The similarities are by design. It's a bummer, then, that Truffaut himself expressed disappointment with the finished film when reflecting on it years later; because this was an early color effort, the director often engaged in arguments on set with cinematographer Raoul Coutard and couldn't pay as much attention to the performances or the tone as he would have liked. It will still always be funny to me that Tarantino shit-talks a movie (that he also sometimes claims to have never seen) in which a wronged Bride seeks bloody revenge in a series of murderous set pieces -- one that came almost 40 years before his own.

5. Day for Night (1974)

Truffaut's delightful movie about the making of a movie, extremely well-worn territory for the big screen but rarely told with this much joy and genuine affection for the art. Most entries in this genre depict making movies as an impossible struggle, an existential crisis of warring egos and agendas desperately trying to being art to the screen. There's a little of that in Day for Night -- actors can be difficult, schedules don't go as planned -- but it's all treated as part of the puzzle and approached with enthusiasm and positivity. My favorite moments are the little ones that tell us about Truffaut the director (also playing the director in the movie), like a collection of his favorite film books on which he allows his camera to linger or the scene in which his character is seen sleeping and dreaming of nothing but movie theater marquees. Cinema is king!

6. Small Change (1976)

Another expression of pure cinematic joy from a filmmaker who expressed more cinematic joy than most, this time centered around a group of schoolchildren living in Thiers in summer 1976. Like he had done years before in The 400 Blows, Truffaut makes a movie that doesn't just depict childhood but feels like childhood and all of its shades, from silliness and whimsy to first love and heartbreak to the darkness and tragedy of abuse. Loose and semi-improvisational but never less than totally charming, Small Change wound up being one of the director's most celebrated and successful films. It's a masterpiece, one of several Truffaut made during his too-short career.

7. The Last Metro (1980)

There are many hallmarks of a Truffaut film in this, another of his critical and commercial successes: a period setting (in this case WWII), a love triangle, a story of artists fighting to make art. Catherine Deneuve -- reuniting with Truffaut after the great Mississippi Mermaid (which I honestly should have included on this list, dammit) -- and Gerard Depardieu star in a story of a group of actors and artists staging a play at a small theater in Nazi-occupied France. This feels in many ways like Truffaut's most adult and sophisticated film; gone is the youthful exuberance, the looseness of improvisation, the determination to tear up the rules of cinema. And, yet, The Last Metro is still a movie about creating art as an act of protest and rebellion, an act around the rest of life can and should revolve. This was the newest movie to me out of everything on this list and I'm sad it hasn't been in my life for longer because it's so good.

8. Confidentially Yours (1983)

Truffaut's final film before his untimely death the following year is a real return to his early days of paying tribute to his idol Alfred Hitchcock in a much more playful way than some of his more recent output (in the second half of his career, he developed a certain tendency to make some movies not unlike what he once criticized the French film industry of making: period dramas based on literature with an air of self-importance). Fanny Ardent, the director's partner during the making of the film (and mother of their daughter Josephine) plays a secretary investigating some murders her boss is accused of committing. In a career full of creating great female characters in his movies, Ardent's Barbara is possibly my favorite. She's the prototypical Truffaut heroine: smart and funny and capable and romantic and totally human. That's the thing about Truffaut. He was a humanist. The great ones often are.