Any day bringing a new Francois Truffaut film to the Criterion Collection is a good one, so it follows that today is a good day. Though every cinephile’s favorite label already includes a smattering from the French New Wave legend, most notably “Jules Et Jim” and the Antoine Doinel series, today sees the release of a new edition of “The Soft Skin,” an early, often-undervalued film by the filmmaker. So even though we ran an Essentials feature last year to celebrate the Blu-Ray re-release of “Jules et Jim,” we tend to jump at any chance to write about Truffaut. We’ve expanded that feature herein to 15 titles, listed chronologically (yes, we are shaping up for a full retrospective at some point). Truffaut went from runaway schoolboy to bad-boy Cahiers du Cinema critic to wildly acclaimed filmmaker before the age of 27, and passed away of a brain tumor aged only 52 —consequently, his career can sometimes seem brief if brilliant one. Truffaut packed a lot into his quarter-century of work, dancing between autobiography (his Antoine Doinel series), crime drama, period fare, sly comedy, and sometimes all of the above. So take a look through our fifteen favorite Truffaut pictures: if just one reader is inspired to discover just one of these films, today will have been a very good day. “The 400 Blows” (1959)
“The only way to criticize a movie as to make another movie,” Truffaut’s great friend, rival and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once said. And to be fair, the two put their money where their mouths were: after upending the critical establishment with his work at Cahiers du cinema across the 1950s, Truffaut moved into shorts with 1955’s “Une Visite,” and after being inspired by Orson Welles‘ “Touch Of Evil” in 1958, made his feature debut with the autobiographical “The 400 Blows.” While the knives must have been out for it when it premiered at Cannes, Truffaut had the best possible response: he’d made a glorious movie, one that turned the director from firebrand critic to one of cinema’s brightest hopes. Drawing on his own delinquent adolescence, the film is the first of five Truffaut made to focus on his surrogate Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, then aged only 14 and who met the director through a casting call in a newspaper), here facing the worst trouble of his young life so far, as difficulties at home and school lead to him attempting to steal a typewriter from his stepfather, which leads to him being arrested and sent to a center for troubled young boys. A sort of Gallic answer to the Angry Young Man narrative that was emerging at almost exactly the same time across the Channel and the Atlantic with “Look Back In Anger” and “Rebel Without A Cause,” it’s a deeply moving and humane picture that captures about as accurately as anything that’s ever been made the effects of rampant hormones when you’re fourteen and hate your parents, your teachers, and pretty much everyone, principally thanks to its laser-tight focus on Antoine. By which we mean Truffaut: this is essentially cinema in the first-person, with the filmmaker demonstrating in practice what he’d been talking about for so long in terms of the auteur theory. With distance, it’s easy to forget what a technical firecracker it must have been —even on a limited budget, the black-and-white Cinemascope looks thoroughly gorgeous, and his command of where his camera looks and where he cuts is immensely confident. The film, which won Truffaut Best Director at Cannes (a festival from which he was banned as a critic the year before), is dedicated to Andre Bazin, the great critic who’d passed just as the director was preparing to make the film and who’d been both a mentor and something of a saviour to him. We all have a reason to be thankful to Bazin. “Shoot The Piano Player” (1960)
Godard followed his friend’s footsteps into feature films with 1960’s “Breathless” (which the pair wrote together), but the same year saw Truffaut follow up his debut with his own playful noir picture, an adaptation of David Goodis‘ novel “Down There.” “Shoot The Piano Player” is a definite reaction against “The 400 Blows” —Truffaut considered the latter film very French and wanted to showcase his love of American cinema and kick against expectations, saying at the time “I wanted to please the real film buffs and only them, even if meant confusing most of the people who liked ‘The 400 Blows.’ In the end, ‘Shoot The Piano Player,’ may confuse everyone, but so what.” True to that statement, the film probably stands as the director’s most experimental work, though experimental might be the wrong word for it —it’s a playful film, mischievous and restless, and more comic than you might expect. The plot nominally focuses on singing star Charles Aznavour as the musician of the title drawn into the underworld to protect his brother, but Truffaut couldn’t really be less interested in the story —there’s a loose, freewheeling energy closer to “Hellzapoppin‘” than, say, Nicholas Ray, grabbing on to whatever transgressions and sidebars take the director’s fancy. It probably says something that the entire second half of the film is made up mostly by a flashback. It should feel like the classic second album syndrome —indulgent and self-involved— but there’s something deeply infectious and enjoyable about the picture. Having come to grips with the medium first time around, this is now a director taking Orson Welles‘ proverbial best-train-set-a-boy-could-ask-for and building it into loop-the-loops and corkscrews. It’s probably Truffaut’s most Godardian picture in some ways, but as if Godard had grown up on the Marx Brothers and Ernst Lubitsch. While it’s critical and commercial failure meant that the director never really repeated his experiment, the film’s DNA is present in much of what follows.
