Boston Globe (07/Oct/1994) - Portraits' renders Truffaut truthfully

Details

• article: Portraits' renders Truffaut truthfully
• author(s): Jay Carr
• newspaper: Boston Globe (07/Oct/1994)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, André Bazin, Cahiers du Cinéma, François Truffaut

Article

Portraits' renders Truffaut truthfully

MOVIEW REVIEW

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: STOLEN PORTRAITS

Documentary directed by: Serge Toubiana and Michel Pascal

At: Brattle (in French, subtitles) Unrated

"Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits" doesn't pretend to be anything like the definitive critical documentary biography of the beloved New Wave ringleader who died too soon, at 52, 10 years ago. Essentially, its French-speaking heads add up to a set of undigested but highly diverting footnotes from people he knew, loved and worked with. Only occasionally does it cut to clips from his films — or does it need to. It's a must for those who know his work and will bear out what everyone knew, namely that his films were intensely autobiographical.

It isn't uniformly adoring. Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier tells of a letter Truffaut wrote to screenwriter Pierre Bost, one of the subjects of Truffaut's famous attack on France's so-called cinema of quality in Cahiers du Cinema, a diatribe that made his reputation as a critic. Truffaut wrote Bost that he didn't mean all he said, that he exaggerated in order to make a splash. What was even more extraordinary than the fact that Truffaut sent the letter was the fact that Bost never published it, knowing that to have done so would have sunk Truffaut.

Throughout, the filmmakers portray Truffaut as the recipient of considerable generosity once past the loveless childhood he transformed into the film that launched him, "The 400 Blows." Janine Bazin recalls how she and her late husband, the critic Andre Bazin, first to champion Truffaut, shared their home with him for two years, becoming his surrogate family. They laughed a lot, Bazin recalls. Truffaut was a charmer. His divorced wife, Madeleine Morgenstern, says that marriage to her and access to her father's film distribution company didn't make that much difference, that Truffaut would have succeeded anyway, that all they did was make it happen a year sooner.

The late Jean Renoir, one of Truffaut's two idols (Alfred Hitchcock was the other) characteristically reacts large-heartedly to Truffaut, telling the camera he envied Truffaut the picnic scene with Jeanne Moreau in "Jules and Jim" and wishes he could have shot it. Truffaut is seen exercising his charm and enthusiasm for Hitchcock by saying that while others filmed love scenes as if they were murders, Hitchcock filmed scenes of murder as if they were scenes of love.

Robert Lachenay, the boyhood buddy whose boldness buoys Truffaut's young alter ego, Antoine Doinel, in "The 400 Blows," confirms Truffaut's self-portrait of a boy ignored by his mother and unloved by his stepfather, which led to the score-settling in that film, and made it easy to find a basis for Truffaut's unfulfilling relations with women and constant pursuit of them. An aunt recalls how devastated his parents were by Truffaut's portrait of them in "The 400 Blows." It wasn't until after she died (also young, at 52) that Truffaut found among his mother's effects letters and photographs indicating that she did indeed care about him.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played Truffaut's surrogate self, Doinel, in several films, is not interviewed, perhaps reflecting Truffaut's ambivalence about usurping Leaud's life and opening his own. Touchingly, we learn that Truffaut hired a private detective to find his biological father, who turned out to be a Jewish dentist. Truffaut could not bring himself to do more than observe him from a distance. Although Truffaut's ex-wife and his two daughters, Ewa and Laura, are heard from, they are more loving and even protective than probing in their backward glances, which include the observation that Truffaut was interested in psychology, but avoided analysis on the grounds that his neuroses fed his creativity.

Fanny Ardant, the actress with whom Truffaut had a third daughter, is also more inclined to uncritical affection than introspection, although she agrees with the other women close to him that Truffaut was a workaholic and a careerist who, in the words of Ewa Truffaut, used himself up. There's no disputing that filmmakers Serge Toubiana and Michel Pascal got to the right people or that "Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits" provides an admirable basis for the full-length portrait of Truffaut yet to emerge.