“Jules Et Jim” (1962)
1962’s “Jules et Jim” is the film that launched a thousand rom-coms and a million study-abroad years in Paris, with its loose lyrical story of a love triangle between two friends (Henri Serre and Oskar Werner) and a freewheeling Bohemian girl (Jeanne Moreau). Probably Truffaut’s most popular and accessible film today, several scenes —the race across the railway bridge, the leap in the lake, the musical refrain of “On s’est connus”— are obvious sources for the montages of delirious capering that pass for romantic storylines in much of current cinema. But “Jules et Jim” is, technically and narratively-speaking, a remarkably adventurous and complex film which Truffaut arguably never bettered. “Jules et Jim” was shot by Raoul Coutard, Godard’s cinematographer throughout the ’60s as well as Costa-Gavras‘ on “Z”, and it’s when watching this film that you realize that more than any of the New Wave directors (and in spite of their allegiance to auteur theory) it was Coutard who liberated the camera and transformed the whole feeling of cinema in the early ’60s, shooting parts of “Jules et Jim” from a vantage point on a moving bicycle. But while the style is hyper-modern and the rebellious vibe feels very 1960s, the underappreciated heart of “Jules et Jim” is historical. Jules et Jim’s friendship founders partly on the issue of Catherine, but just as much on the fact that Jim is Austrian, Jules is French, and the movie takes place before, during and after the First World War: it’s amazing how easily this is forgotten by people who think of Moreau’s outfits as the last word in ’60s cool. Although it only features a few moments of newsreel from the trenches, “Jules et Jim” is one of the great war and anti-war movies, up there with Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion” and Powell and Pressburger’s “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (from which it borrows the basics of its plot) as a statement on the pity and futility of European war. As such, it’s a strangely old-fashioned film that sits uncomfortably next to the rest of the New Wave’s fantasies of revolutionary violence. But it’s from that background of history and personal tragedy that “Jules et Jim” gets its deep emotional depth, which keeps it a fascinating film long after its technical innovations have been absorbed into the mainstream. “The Soft Skin” (1964)
The eighth film of Truffaut’s to receive the Criterion treatment, “The Soft Skin” is the perfect choice for reappraisal, especially as it divided critical opinion on release. It didn’t help that it followed one of the most spectacular runs in cinema history with Truffaut’s last three solo-directed features being “Jules et Jim,” “Shoot the Piano Player” and “The 400 Blows.” But in contrast with the ebullience and experimentation of ‘Jules,’ “The Soft Skin” feels classical, almost dour at times, a meticulous, quasi-procedural take on melodrama remarkable for its cool, level gaze at its characters’ morality. Following Pierre (Jean Desailly), a married, late-middle-aged, celebrated Balzac scholar as he embarks on an affair with air hostess Nicole (Francois Dorleac), Truffaut seems in absolute control, somehow imbuing humdrum episodes with the tension of a thriller and the most banal exchanges with diamond-cut flashes of insight. Pierre and Nicole (who incidentally is the subject of the line “Tu dors Nicole?” which was borrowed as the title for Stephane Lafleur‘s wonderful 2014 film which we reviewed out of Cannes) reconnect in Paris, and if the beats of this relationship drama are marked as though it were a murder mystery, the central “setpiece” is undoubtedly their abortive trip to Reims during which the darkly comic consequences, the sheer inconveniences and the humiliations that their situation visit on them are brought home in force. As so often, it’s domestic details like a pair of stockings or the inability to be rude to an irritating acquaintance that scuppers their plans and leads to the unmistakable emasculation of the lightly pompous Pierre. But then in the final third, a most unexpected bait-and-switch occurs as Pierre’s wife Franca comes into focus —catching his lies, plotting revenge, screaming at a creep on the street in a brilliant callback to Nicole being propositioned earlier. Suddenly, it feels like this not-very experimental film is in fact very much so, just on a meta, narrative level as it’s only late on that Franca emerges as possibly the real main character. And it’s only at the point of death that the film comes roaring full-blooded to life, in a climax built on impatient cross-cutting that would do Alfred Hitchcock proud. Elegant, imperfect and deeply absorbing.
“The Bride Wore Black” (1968)
Based like the following year’s “Mississippi Mermaid” on a novel by crime writer Cornell Woolrich, “The Bride Wore Black” is ostensibly one of Truffaut’s pulpier offerings: a pure revenge tale with an iconic lead that many have pointed to as an inspiration for “Kill Bill” (though Quentin Tarantino denied ever having seen it). The picture certainly has one foot in the genre world, but in Truffaut’s hands it turns into something altogether stranger and more haunting, and though it’s not entirely successful, it’s fascinating all the same. The film opens with grief-stricken, black-clad widow Julie (Jeanne Moreau, reunited with Truffaut for the first time since “Jules et Jim”) attempting to kill herself, only being prevented from doing so her by mother. Instead she channels her grief into a roaring rampage of revenge against the five men (who include character actor faves like Michael Lonsdale and Charles Denner) who killed her husband on their wedding day. It could be simple exploitation fare and was sold somewhat as such, but Truffaut complicates things, introducing a welcome element of moral ambivalence: the five men weren’t targeting the late Mr. Julie but shot him accidentally when dicking around with a loaded rifle, making Moreau’s quest distinctly shadier than the average revenge saga (the scene in which she seals Lonsdale’s family man into a cupboard under the stairs and leaves him to suffocate is positively horrifying). There’s also some cunning if hardly oblique use of metaphor at play, with each man representing a different way in which men can oppress, manipulate, or condescend to women, with Moreau using her sexuality to cause their undoing. More than any of his other early films, “The Soft Skin” included, this is Truffaut paying tribute to the style of his idol Hitchcock (right down to a Bernard Herrmann score), but he’s a very different filmmaker, and the dichotomy doesn’t quite work: Truffaut’s got a looser style and here at least he isn’t as interested in creating the precision-tooled suspense of his hero. Perhaps as a result, Truffaut mostly agreed with the negative reaction of the French critics, feeling that the film was at best a compromised effort (it was his first in color and he clashed with longtime DoP Raoul Coutard, reportedly feeling that he didn’t give the actors and tone enough attention as a result). But while it’s undoubtedly a little more disposable than some of his work, it’s still a beguiling, rich picture with much more to unpack than your average revenge thriller. “Stolen Kisses” (1968)
Truffaut had picked up Antoine Doinel’s story with the 1962 short “Antoine and Colette,” his swoony, featherlight contribution to the anthology picture “Love At Twenty” but the director’s alter ego got his next real feature-length showcase almost a decade on from “The 400 Blows” with 1968’s “Stolen Kisses,” and it might just be the finest of the Doinel pictures. After flirting with the idea of putting Jean-Pierre Leaud and his character in a script like “Shoot The Piano Player” or Godard’s ‘Bande A Part” and beginning work on a discarded screenplay based on his early days in journalism, Truffaut instead makes our hero a drifting twentysomething dishonorably discharged from the army, floating between a number of jobs he’s swiftly fired from (including a memorable stint as a private detective), and circling round his sweetheart Christine (a delightful Claude Jade, who’d go on to star in Hitchcock’s “Topaz“), while also lusting after his boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig). It’s a looser and less focused film than ‘Blows’ or “Antoine & Colette,” with a structure that’s something close to farce (again Lubitsch and even Preston Sturges feel present under the surface, and rewatching it now reveals it to be an obvious influence on “Frances Ha“). It helps that Leaud, at the time 24, has grown into a hugely impressive performer, possessing deft comic timing as well as an ability to make the audience identify just as much as Truffaut clearly did. While it’s a direct sequel to “The 400 Blows,” it spiritually has as much in common with “Shoot The Piano Player,” from the light noir trappings of the detective scenes to the abrupt, but entirely effective, shifts in tone. The following Doinel pictures, 1970’s “Bed And Board” and 1979’s “Love On The Run,” are absolutely worth watching as well, but the character is at his most fleshed-out and fully realized in the centerpiece of the sequence here.
