Tartan Video kicks off its François Truffaut DVD collection with two of his most renowned films: Jules et Jim (1961), the third feature film from the start of his career, and Le Dernier Mètro/The Last Metro (1980), the third film from the end of it. Those are two from an output of twenty-one features, several enticing shorts, and much more besides.
If filmmakers can be thought of in movements, or generations (the 'Tarantino generation' of US indie directors in the mid nineties, the 'Golden Age' of the studio system in the thirties and forties), Truffaut was, of course, one of the original members of the French nouvelle vague. This group also comprised chiefly Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. These Frenchmen who had grown up disdaining the blandness of French heritage cinema of the time and in adoration of American directors (or directors with 'American' careers) such as Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut, Godard and the others drew upon the auteur theory, which posited the notion that the director is the principal creative force, the author, of the film. With sly cinematic references and a willingness to experiment with different forms of narrative, the nouvelle vague directors breathed fresh air into the movies, helped make film studies a legitimate discipline, and in their turn influenced subsequent generations of US and world filmmakers.
While Godard remains the benchmark for idiosyncratic French filmmaking, Truffaut's work is less extreme, though no less passionate. The style is warmer, more eager to please, and complements his commitment to characters and story. Jules et Jim, adapted by Truffaut and Jean Gruault from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, is a love triangle story set on either side of the First World War. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a German student, the French Jim (Henri Serre) his best buddy; the voice-over which introduces them - and which Scorsese has acknowledged as an influence on GoodFellas (1990) - compares them to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), and the triangle is set. After the war, Catherine becomes Jim's lover, but Jules remains a key figure for both of them, and if the trajectory of the story is ultimately tragic, the film achieves a real frivolity around the notion of good people falling prey to their own emotions. Jules et Jim is very gracefully shot in black and white by Raoul Coutard and the period detail is realised authentically but without ostentation. Truffaut's major achievement with this film is in delivering a very literary piece (the voice-over is a continual reminder of the film's origins as a novel) which is also drunk on its own modern cinematic artistry; his way of compressing vast amounts of information, for example, is dazzling.
The commercial and critical success of Jules et Jim cemented Truffaut's arrival, just as Les Quatre Cents Coups/The 400 Blows (1959), his feature debut, had announced it. Les Quatre Cents Coups is, according to Truffaut, based on its director's own childhood. It stars a thirteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel, a gererally well-meaning but tearaway kid in Paris, whose exploits, depicted in a loose, but linear, narrative, take him from school to runaway status to a young offenders' institution. Les Quatre Cents Coups won Truffaut the Best Director award at Cannes, and remains one of his finest films. A DVD of it would be indispensible, especially as the US Criterion disc is out of print.
Truffaut's other most famous achievements are La Nuit Américaine/Day For Night (1973), his film about movie-making, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar; his last big hit, Le Dernier Mètro; and, of course, his performance as the French scientist keeping a level head amidst the cover-ups and eagerly asked questions in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Perhaps he was consciously following a tradition of big-name directors acting in other people's movies - one thinks of Vittorio de Sica in A Farewell To Arms (1957), Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Blvd. (1950), John Huston in The Cardinal (1963) and Chinatown (1974) - but Truffaut had also acted for himself several times, for example as the doctor in L'Enfant Sauvage/The Wild Child (1969), the director in La Nuit Américaine, and the widower in La Chambre Verte/The Green Room (1978). La Chambre Verte is indicative of his style in the later films: it contains a mounting seriousness and melancholy, as if Truffaut was somehow aware that only a few years later, in 1984, he would die of a brain tumour, at the age of fifty-two.
That is how it appears in retrospect, compounded because his career at that point gave no clues as to where he might have been headed artistically. Le Dernier Mètro seemed to be a crowning point, winning ten Césars, and providing significant roles for Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. Set during the Second World War, it is a story of a Jewish theatre manager in hiding, and mixes war, romance, and theatrics into an entertaining, very mainstream package. But what else did Truffaut have to say? Among the uncompleted projects at the time of his death, one of his screenplays was made into La Petite Voleuse/The Little Thief (1989), but that hardly touched on new thematic territory. But, fascinatingly, several of his lesser known films are, in fact, among his finest achievements, and deserve looking at again, and in decent prints: consider, for example, La Sirène du Mississippi/Mississippi Mermaid (1969), a fatalistic romance with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Deneuve; Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent/Anne and Muriel (1971), another love triangle story, but different from Jules et Jim in that it is more specifically about the artistic temperament wrestling with passion; and L'Histoire d'Adèle H./The Story of Adèle H. (1975), which is uncertain Truffaut, but which contains a phenomenal performance from Isabelle Adjani as the daughter of Victor Hugo infatuated with a British soldier and very vulnerable in the face of the terrible destructive force of unrequited love.
Truffaut's films demonstrate a true love for cinema and a facility for a variety of topics, always treated with modesty and compassion. It is a career with qualities that any wannabe filmmaker would surely hope to emulate.
