VHS

click here for dvds

The Last Metro (1981) - English subtitles

François Truffaut again tackles the elusive nature of creativity and the elusive creation in this thoughtful, sumptuous, 1980 film. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar, and a winner of various Césars, The Last Metro is a tale of the theater in occupied France during World War II. Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) manages the Theatre Montmarte in the stead of her Jewish husband, director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent). He has purportedly fled France but is really hiding out in the basement of the theater. The one hope to save the Montmarte is a new play starring the dashing Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu). The attraction between Marion and Bernard is palpable, and as usual Truffaut creates tension and drama from even the most casual of occurrences. The theme of the director locked away while his lover and his creation are appropriated by others makes for interesting Truffaut study, but first and foremost this is a well-spun romance.

 

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

The classic science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury was a curious choice for one of the leading directors of the French New Wave, François Truffaut. But from the opening credits onward (spoken, not written on screen), Truffaut takes Bradbury's fascinating premise and makes it his own. The futuristic society depicted in Fahrenheit 451 is a culture without books. Firemen still race around in red trucks and wear helmets, but their job is to start fires: they ferret out forbidden stashes of books, douse them with gasoline, and make public bonfires. Oskar Werner, the star of Truffaut's Jules and Jim, plays a fireman named Montag, whose exposure to David Copperfield wakens an instinct toward reading and individual thought. (That's why books are banned--they give people too many ideas.) In an intriguing casting flourish, Julie Christie plays two roles: Montag's bored, drugged-up wife and the woman who helps kindle the spark of rebellion. The great Bernard Herrmann wrote the hard-driving music; Nicolas Roeg provided the cinematography. Fahrenheit 451 received a cool critical reception and has never quite been accepted by Truffaut fans or sci-fi buffs. Its deliberately listless manner has always been a problem, although that is part of its point; the lack of reading has made people dry and empty. If the movie is a bit stiff (Truffaut did not speak English well and never tried another project in English), it nevertheless is full of intriguing touches, and the ending is lyrical and haunting.

 

 

The 400 Blows (1959) - English subtitles

Francois Truffaut's first feature was this 1959 portrait of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a boy who turns to petty crime in the face of neglect at home and hard times at a reform school. Somewhat autobiographical for its director, the film helped usher in the heady spirit of the French New Wave, and introduced the Doinel character, who became a fixture in Truffaut's movies over the years. Poignant, exhilarating, and fun (there's a parade of cameo appearances from some of the essential icons and directors from the movement), this film is an important classic.

Jules and Jim (1962) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's third feature, though it's named for the two best friends who become virtually inseparable in pre-World War I Paris, is centered on Jeanne Moreau's Catherine, the most mysterious, enigmatic woman in his career-long gallery of rich female portraits. Adapted from the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, Truffaut's picture explores the 30-year friendship between Austrian biologist Jules (Oskar Werner) and Parisian writer Jim (Henri Serre) and the love triangle formed when the alluring Catherine makes the duo a trio. Spontaneous and lively, a woman of intense but dynamic emotions, she becomes the axle on which their friendship turns as Jules woos her and they marry, only to find that no one man can hold her. Directed in bursts of concentrated scenes interspersed with montage sequences and pulled together by the commentary of an omniscient narrator, Truffaut layers his tragic drama with a wealth of detail. He draws on his bag of New Wave tricks for the carefree days of youth--zooms, flash cuts, freeze frames--that disappear as the marriage disintegrates during the gloom of the postwar years. Werner is excellent as Jules, a vibrant young man whose slow, melancholy slide into emotional compromise is charted in his increasingly sad eyes and resigned face, while Serre plays Jim as more of an enigma, guarded and introspective. But both are eclipsed in the glare of Moreau's radiant Catherine: impulsive, demanding, sensual, passionate, destructive, and ultimately unknowable. A masterpiece of the French New Wave and one of Truffaut's most confident and accomplished films.

 

The Woman Next Door (1981) - English subtitles

This is a film which epitomizes not only Francois Truffaut's recurrent themes - obsessive love, an ordinary man's cognizant self-destruction - but also his style of understatement, which, as a personal favorite of mine, is closer to the experience of real life than that of any other filmmaker. When one witnesses a supreme disaster, what does one notice? Not the kind of coverage of events such as many "hot" American directors today think is powerful - dozens of shots that show the same action over and over again in closeup, medium shot, full shot, tracking shot, crane shot, computer FX shot, you-name-it shot; but instead from the point of view of ONE person who is intimately involved - who may miss half of the action, yet agonizingly fills in what he missed with what he imagines. This is the genius of Truffaut, who represents this admirable Gallic trait perhaps as much as any other French artist of the twentieth century. The acting of the principals Ardant and Depardieu is perfection, and the story is one of relentless emotional buildup, leading to a shattering denoument.

 

The Story of Adele H. (1975) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's dramatization of the true story of Adele Hugo, the daughter of French author-in-exile Victor Hugo, and her romantic obsession with a young French officer is a cinematically beautiful and emotionally wrenching portrait of a headstrong but unstable young woman. Adele (Isabelle Adjani, whose pale face gives her the quality of a cameo portrait) travels under a false name and spins a half-dozen false stories about herself and her relationship to Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), the Hussar she follows to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pinson no longer loves her, but she refuses to accept his rejection. Sinking farther and farther into her own internal world, she passes herself off as his wife and pours out her stormy emotions into a personal journal filled with delusional descriptions of her fantasy life. Beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros in vivid color, Truffaut's re-creation of the 1860s is accomplished not merely in impressive sets and locations but in the very style of the film: narration and voiceovers, written journal entries and letters, journeys and locations established with map reproductions, and a judicious use of stills mix old-fashioned cinematic technique with poetic flourishes. The result is one of Truffaut's most haunting portraits, all the more powerful because it's true.

 

Day for Night (1973) - Dubbed in English

François Truffaut's lavish and fun 1973 comedy-drama about a film production is a clever hall of mirrors, with Truffaut himself playing a director, and his most important actor in real life, Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows), portraying Jacqueline Bisset's immature costar. Day for Night is full of tales undoubtedly told out of school and repeated here in camouflage, and one can't help but be impressed with the stylistic and technical means by which Truffaut captures the adventurousness of a full-budget shoot. The cast is very good all around, with actors in some cases playing fictional thespians and in other cases playing members of the crew. A sequence set to thrilling music by Georges Delerue celebrates the whole art of filmmaking as seen from an editor's perspective--it makes one want to drop everything and shoot a film of one's own

 

 

Confidentially Yours (1983) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's last film is both a homage and a lark. Without the brooding poutiness it's a homage to Alfred Hitchcock, and it's possible to watch this film just for the parallels or outright hat-tipping that goes on. It's the story of an older, hapless real-estate agent, Vercel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), under suspicion for a ruthless murder. Since this is a black-and-white, subtitled French film, the agent's voluptuous, intelligent secretary (a sharp and sexy Fanny Ardant) is hopelessly in love with him. While he hides out in the back office, she tries to get to the bottom of the crime; this is not so much a whodunit as a cinematic treat about the conventions and setups of film noir. Under the beautiful cinematography of Néstor Almendros, this is a film rainy Sunday afternoons were made for.

 

 

 

The Green Room (1978) - English subtitles

Based on two short stories by Henry James, The Green Room has a few Gothic overtones that are quickly supplanted by director François Truffaut's occasional predilection toward personal scrutiny as a filmmaker. Truffaut himself (as he did in The Wild Child) stars in the central role of a 1920s provincial journalist whose virtual solitude as a widower and father of a deaf-mute child exacerbates his unrelieved grief over the death of his wife and the loss of many friends during World War I. His reinvention of a dilapidated chapel into something more than a memorial for the dead--a container, rather, of his own manifest memories of their vital, abbreviated lives--becomes an obsession that takes its physical and spiritual toll. It is also, in Truffaut's often self-reflective way, a metaphor for the act of making movies: haunted places of people, memories, and ideas that exist forever as light and shadow on screen. One of the most curious of Truffaut's films, this 1978 feature doesn't entirely work in part because the demands on Truffaut as an actor exceed his abilities, and in part because it is an opaque mix of his running self-critique and the more accessible emotions of his earlier memory films such as Jules and Jim and Two English Girls.

 

Shoot the Piano Player (1960) - English subtitles

A man runs through deserted night streets, stalked by the lights of a car. It's a definitive film noir situation, promptly sidetracked--yet curiously not undercut--by real-life slapstick: watching over his shoulder for pursuers, the running man charges smack into a lamppost. The figure that helps him to his feet is not one of the pursuers (they've oddly disappeared) but an anonymous passerby, who proceeds to escort him for a block or two, genially schmoozing about the mundane, slow-blooming glories of marriage. The Good Samaritan departs at the next turning, never to be identified and never to be seen again. And the first man--who, despite this evocative introduction, is not even destined to be the main character of the movie--immediately resumes his helter-skelter flight from an as-yet-unspecified and unseen menace. The opening of Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut's second feature film, is one of the signal moments of the French New Wave--an inspired intersection of grim fatality and happy accident, location shooting and lurid melodrama, movie convention and frowzy, uncontainable life. At this point in his career--right after The 400 Blows, just before his great Jules and Jim--the world seemed wide for Truffaut, as wide as the Dyaliscope screen that he and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deployed with unprecedented spontaneity and lyricism. Anything might wander into frame and become part of the flow: an oddball digression, an unexpected change of mood, a small miracle of poetic insight. The official agenda of the movie is adapting a noirish story by American writer David Goodis, about a celebrated concert musician (Charles Aznavour) hiding out as a piano player in a saloon. He's on the run as much as the guy--his older brother--in the first scene. But whereas the brother is worried about a couple of buffoonish gangsters, Charlie Koller is ducking out on life, love, and the possibility that he might be hurt, or cause hurt, again. Decades after its original release, Shoot the Piano Player remains as fresh, exhilarating, and heartbreaking--as open to the magic of movies and life--as ever.

 

 

 

Small Change (1976) - English subtitles

Critic Pauline Kael neatly summed up the timeless appeal of François Truffaut's 1976 film by calling it "that rarity--a poetic comedy that's really funny." In other words, Truffaut's brilliant, upbeat study of resilient children in a French village is both artistically satisfying and joyously entertaining, proving yet again (after his acclaimed debut film The 400 Blows) that few directors remembered and understood the experience of childhood as clearly as Truffaut. The film's episodic structure reveals its young characters gradually, leaving them and returning to them as their individual stories unfold. Most of the sketches are hilarious (as when a little girl uses a megaphone to announce that she's been "abandoned," resulting in generous gifts of food from her surrounding neighbors), but there's also a story about a boy with abusive parents who learns to survive by his own ingenuity. Throughout, this remarkable film gets all the details precisely right, featuring a youthful cast of kids who don't seem to be acting at all. It's as if Truffaut had somehow gained privileged entrance into their world, and they carried on as if the camera simply wasn't there. (Another French film, Ponette, would achieve a similar, more heartbreaking feat two decades later.)

 

Mississippi Mermaid (1969) - English subtitles

Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as the owner of a cigarette factory on an African island, and a single man who advertises for a wife and, voilà, gets Catherine Deneuve. Problem is, however, she isn't quite what she seems in this 1969 drama by François Truffaut, taken from a Cornell Woolrich novel called Waltz into Darkness. Suspicions lead to deception and deception to murder, and along the way Belmondo's character, despite everything, continues to fall in love with his enigmatic prize, which is really the point of the film: the protagonist, almost as if he were willing himself into a noir myth, seems determined to fall under the spell of a romantic delusion. A fine effort by Truffaut that is the best of his mid-period pulpy, suspense films (along with The Bride Wore Black and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me).

 

The Wild Child (1970) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's fascinating 1969 film, based on a real-life, 18th-century behavioral scientist's efforts to turn a feral boy into a civilized specimen, is an ingenious and poignant experience. In a piece of resonant casting that immediately turns this story into an echo of the creative process, Truffaut himself plays Dr. Itard, a specialist in the teaching of the deaf. Itard takes in a young lad (Jean-Pierre Cargol) found to have been living like an animal in the woods all his life. In the spirit of social experiment, Itard uses rewards and punishments to retool the boy's very existence into something that will impress the world. Beautifully photographed in black and white and making evocative use of such charmingly antiquated filmmaking methods as the iris shot, The Wild Child has a semidocumentary form that barely veils Truffaut's confessional slant. What does it mean to turn the raw material of life into a monument to one's own experience and bias? The question has all sorts of intriguing reverberations when one considers that Truffaut's own wild childhood was rescued by love of the cinema and that a degree of verisimilitude factors into his films starring Jean-Pierre Leaud--the troubled lad who grew up in Truffaut's work from The 400 Blows onward. (The Wild Child is dedicated to Leaud.)

 

The Man Who Loved Women

Scientist Bertrand Morane, "never in the company of men after 5," seduces women by evening and writes about the experiences in the early morning. Though 40ish and somewhat square, no woman in the town of Montpelier seems capable of resisting his earnest advances. Not much else happens in The Man Who Loved Women, but in the hands of master visual storyteller François Truffaut, the threadbare plot accumulates deep and ominous philosophical resonances. What drives Morane from woman to woman, and what accounts for his remarkable success? Does he secretly dislike women and consider them interchangeable (as one of the more prurient characters charges, to Morane's genuine befuddlement), or is his enthusiasm a kind of celebration? Truffaut refuses to answer plainly, but does drop clues; as his camera focuses on everyday objects, many take on a chilling, otherwordly luster, and coldly foreshadow Morane's fate. A deceptively simple film, The Man Who Loved Women is neither an indictment nor an apology for philandering; rather, it's a courageous, lovingly detailed portrait of a complex, intelligent man suffering from an altogether intractable complaint. This film was clumsily remade in English in 1983 by Blake Edwards, with Burt Reynolds assuming the role played here with such understated skill by the wonderful Charles Denner.

 

The Man Who Loved Women (1977) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's 1957 short "Les Mistons" (roughly translated to "The Brats") is an early testament to Truffaut's affinity with kids and his first exploration of impossible love. Five boys palling around one summer fall for a teen beauty, but as the narrator (one of the five) describes, "Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate her--and torment her." These adolescent boys are neither cute nor innocent, but Truffaut sympathizes with the frustration born of budding hormones and sexual mystery. In 1962, he revisited similar territory in the sketch "Antoine and Collette." The second film to feature alter ego Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), it was originally made for the omnibus film Love at Twenty but has outlived its companion shorts. As romantic and gently ironic as The 400 Blows is harsh and haunting, this modest 20-minute lark finds a teenage Antoine pursuing the lovely, lithe 20-year-old Colette (Marie-France Pisier) like a lovesick puppy dog. The comic sweetness of this episode sets the tone for all future Doinel films, and Léaud, who matured into the poster boy for the French new wave, displays the lanky charm and self-effacing egotism that propelled him through some of the greatest films of the next two decades.

 

The Soft Skin (1964) - English subtitles

François Truffaut's cool, creamy-smooth melodrama of a doomed affair sets the lush romanticism of exciting indiscretion in a world where sudden stabs of ominous music hint at a tragedy in the making. Jean Desailly is a famous literary critic and publisher who becomes entranced with the lithe, strikingly beautiful flight attendant (Françoise Dorleac) who keeps crisscrossing his path while he's away on a speaking engagement. He's middle-aged, successful, and seemingly happily married with a wife and daughter, but he plunges ahead with an affair, careful to avoid friends and familiar places. The Soft Skin is not really a thriller, but Truffaut invests it with Hitchcockian echoes of guilt and fear of discovery, and he meticulously plots scenes with the precision of a heist film. Pulling back the veneer of chic elegance and attractive confidence, Desailly emerges not so much sordid as vain and pathetic, and his wife (Nelly Benedetti) comes into her own with her heartbreaking discovery of his lies. At once angry, hurt, and threatened, she grasps at reconciliation while sabotaging her own efforts with frustrated attacks. It's an unusual film with sudden changes in tone that do little to prepare the viewer for the dark climax: the tragic side of Truffaut's fascination with philandering men that runs throughout his career. Fans will recognize the scene with the kitten who licks off the plate set out for room service--he re-created it in Day for Night.

 

Love on the Run (1979) - English subtitles

This was François Truffaut's last film in the Antoine Doinel series (the character followed from The 400 Blows to Bed and Board). Doinel is again played by Jean-Pierre Léaud as a bad boy whose own obsessions with his mother greatly affect his relationships with women. Here, our compulsive liar and general scamp is found out, time and time again, but, as the women of the film find, it's impossible to blame him entirely. In fact, it seems a French badge of honor to have your mistress show up at your door. The film stands on its own as a light and gentle comedy but carries much more resonance if watched in its proper place and order in the series. It also stars the devastatingly gorgeous Marie-France Pisier as an old acquaintance who calls Doinel on the carpet.