A newly released collection of his masterworks reminds us of movies we need right now.
The new François Truffaut Collection arrives right on time to relieve awards-season exhaustion. The four-film Blu-ray set from Kino, plus three separately released classics, is sorely needed proof that movies can touch the eye, mind, and soul.
Truffaut worked from 1959 to 1984, the era when moviegoers expected artistic expression. His masterpieces The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim, plus the crowd-pleasing Day for Night, made him famous. The Kino releases take us deeper into the romantic vision that immortalized Truffaut’s name as the most popular director of the French New Wave movement (Nouvelle Vague). Even Steven Spielberg paid homage to Truffaut, casting him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as Lacombe, the French scientist whose wise-child countenance and otherworldly empathy could communicate across nations and with aliens.
This was a fortuitous collaboration, as if Spielberg appreciated Truffaut’s kind, profoundly humanist perspective and sought those qualities for his own great epic. It is Truffaut’s globe-trotting Lacombe who grasps the aliens’ musical sign language.
Truffaut’s polyglot art, seen in the Kino discs, puts all this year’s Oscar nominees to shame.
The Man Who Loved Women (1977) satirizes the exploits of a skirt-chaser (Charles Denner) yet remains awestruck at the feminine mystery that captivates men. It is a necessary rebuttal to the misandry of Women Talking.
The Bride Wore Black (1968, starring Jeanne Moreau as a vengeful newlywed) baffles meathead movie buffs such as Quentin Tarantino, who insulted Truffaut as “a bumbling amateur.” But QT merely reveals his own foolishness by ignoring Truffaut’s deft rhythms. Bride uses Hitchcock’s late sexual pathology for a far-ranging yet elegant sociological complaint. It surpasses The Banshees of Inisherin.
The Wild Child (1970) combines archaeology and agape when a doctor (Truffaut himself) educates a feral child (Jean-Pierre Cargol). Based on a noble-savage history, about a nine-year-old boy found in the woods of southern France in 1800, its luminosity is timeless. Richer than Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Small Change (1976) observes grade-school kids discovering puppy love and unfair society. The Fabelmans isn’t nearly so astute.
Mississippi Mermaid (1969) delves into the deceptive romance between Jean-Paul Belmondo and his mail-order bride, Catherine Deneuve. Truffaut’s erotic fairy tale transcends the shallow, childish fantasy of Avatar: The Way of Water.
The Story of Adele H. (1975) presents Isabelle Adjani as Victor Hugo’s daughter, sacrificing herself for love. Truffaut’s daring, dashing sympathy supersedes the resentful sexual confusion of Tár.
The Green Room (1978) is the Kino set’s coup de grâce, easily besting all of this year’s Oscar-nominated junk. It’s Truffaut’s most mysterious film — glum on the surface yet a thrilling story of an obit journalist’s devotion to the dead who informed his life. Julian Davenne (played by Truffaut) is fixated on the conventions regarding mortality, a private drive that becomes stranger when he meets a lovely auctioneer (Nathalie Baye) who joins and tests his folie à deux. Baffled by the film’s Henry James pedigree (it’s based on several works by James), reviewers missed that this was Truffaut-the-cinephile’s serious expression of his artistic inspiration and moral debt. Day for Night’s gaiety battles Adele H.’s madness, ending with a philosophical yearning that rivals The Wild Child’s.
Truffaut’s modest lead performance, as a WWI veteran carrying that trauma into his profession (inspiration for Terence Davies’s Benediction), is compensated by cinematographer Néstor Almendros’s burnished light and natural visual textures.
This is the film Almendros left Days of Heaven to complete, and Kino’s Blu-ray restoration does justice to his aesthetic commitment. At least three sequences (Davenne obscured by frosted glass, his lone hand penning an obituary, and the eponymous image of his hermetic seclusion) convey through precise masterstrokes the filmmaker’s lifelong interest in obsessive behavior. This is Truffaut’s most cinema-obsessed film, climaxing in a mise-en-abîme montage — a love sequence of art influences from Balzac to Oscar Wilde to Oskar Werner. The Green Room doesn’t anticipate Truffaut’s own eulogy but confirms the depth of artistic gratitude that he bequeathed to cinema history.
When Truffaut died in 1984, his Nouvelle Vague colleague Jean-Luc Godard lamented, “We have lost our protection,” referring to the bulwark of accessibility that Truffaut provided, allowing the other New Wave directors to confidently experiment with radical forms and ideas without losing distribution and public acclaim. In this welcome set of Truffaut mementos, his exquisite visual-emotional touch brings back the artistic potential that dazzles appreciative audiences. The Green Room conveys a serious, lonely, almost fanatical respect for the humanist heritage. Tarantino knows nothing about this love of art or life. And, as Millennial actress Jenna Ortega recently enthused at the Golden Globes, “If you haven’t seen Jules and Jim, I don’t know what you’re doing. Get on that.”
