1981 - THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR, a story of obsessive love

Francois Truffaut's story is about a very obsessive love affair to put it mildly.  This film features two big French stars, a skinny Gérard Depardieu and Truffaut's love interest in real life, Fanny Ardant.  The film's basic plot is about these two people who were involved in an intense relationship six years earlier. Now married to different people, they find themselves  improbably living next door to each other in a small French town.  Of course they resume their affair two timing their respective spouses.   The film chronicles their descent into madness and death in their obsession with each other.

I'm not giving away the plot here since the film opens with an ambulance racing through the town from  which it can be easily surmised that this story will end in tragedy.  For the most part the film is well directed by Truffaut.  One of his strong points as a filmmaker was getting good performances out of his actors and employing his knowledge of film making technique to tell a story.

 

However it seems that while Truffaut knows how to present their intense love story it just doesn't seem like the characters are a twosome the viewer can feel much sympathy for.  It's seem clear that their relationship was basically about having sex since we never see or hear them talk about their emotions or feelings for each other.  It doesn't help that their respective spouses seem like very reasonable and for the most part nice people compared to them.  Their ultimate tragedy almost seems like a relief since we no longer have to seem them inflict emotional warfare on each other when they are not sliding into bed.

 

Sadly this was the second to the last film from Truffaut who died of a brain tumor about three years later.  His final film with Fanny Ardant was a silly Hitchcock like comedy thriller.  Still Truffaut's overall filmography is very impressive.

The film was written by Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, the running time is 106 minutes.

1973 - DAY FOR NIGHT - aka La Nuit américaine

Truffaut's film about making a film is usually considered one of his best.  It was regarded as a return to form after a recent series of less than enthusiastically received films by the critics and the public.  Day For Night is extremely well made and very entertaining.  Besides being a great filmmaker Truffaut was also a great film buff which he refers to throughout this film with lots of references to famous directors and even scenes from his own films.

Day For Night also has a terrific cast.  Jacqueline Bisset is the lead actor playing Pamela in the film "Meet Pamela" that is being shot.  Truffaut cast himself as the director Ferrand trying to pull "Meet Pamela," across the production finish line.  Jean-Pierre Léaud who essentially played Truffaut's alter ego in his Antoine Donel films is in it as an immature actor.  Jean-Pierre Aumont who had a long career in film is playing Léaud's father and Valentina Cortese a noted Italian actor is Leaud's mother,  characters in "Meet Pamela."

 

Day For Night walks through the film process in an enjoyable way. The viewer gets to see all of the mishaps and compromises that go along during film production.  The cast and crew are like a bunch of rabbits in heat sleeping around with each other during filming.   In a way the film is about how much Truffaut  loves making films and working with his actors even when it's a challenging situation.  

 

Day For Night is an agreeable film to watch.  It is also basically a very lightweight film.  Like the brainless love story "Meet Pamela" that they are filming, there just isn't a whole lot to think about after it's over. The film is apparently a favorite of many film directors and movie buffs but I think the general audience will probably wonder "what is the point" of this thing.

Written by Francois Truffaut , Jean-Louis Richard and Suzanne Schiffman.  The running time is 116 minutes.

1978 - THE GREEN ROOM, a Truffaut misfire.

 I'm not sure what went wrong with this Truffaut film. Francois Truffaut was usually a reliable director/writer but his instincts really deserted him on this film.  The Green Room, is about a man's obsession with death.  He constantly dwells on death and finally creates a memorial to people he knows who have passed on.  This is not exactly going to be a fun film like Day For Night.

In  fairness, this was clearly a very personal film for Truffaut.  He plays the lead and unfortunately he does not do a very good job as an actor.  I can't help thinking a better actor would have helped this film's theme about the effect the dead have on the living.  Playing opposite Truffaut is the actor Natalie Baye who is sort of his partner who has an equal obsession with the deceased.

Frankly the whole film just didn't work for me.  Truffaut always seemed to have a light touch when it came to making films.  But that certainly abandoned or he chose to abandon it in this film.

The running time is 94 minutes and probably nobody would want it to run a minute longer.  Truffaut wrote the screenplay.

1960 - SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, aka Tirez sur le pianiste.

Truffaut makes a film in the American thriller noir style for the first time.  Shoot the Piano Player is filmed in a rather free wheeling style which is to be expected from one of the New Wave directors.  There are a lot of little film jokes and tricks with film editing that really call attention to itself.  But Truffaut was smart enough to keep this film around 90 minutes because a little of this stuff goes a long way especially from a French film nut.

The film has some notable photography from Raoul Coutard who was an expert when it came to making something out of nothing.  Coutard knew who shoot with almost no supplemental lighting and was an expert with the hand held camera.  At times the film has a real documentary flair to it.

92 minutes.

1976 - SMALL CHANGE, Truffaut film about childhood is pretty good.

Truffaut's film about school children in a provincial French town, is very good but probably not a masterpiece.

The film is essentially a series of episodic stories about the children, first love, parents being mean to kids, etc.  This is what is called a "gentle comedy."  Small Change gets serious towards the end when it is discovered that one of the kids is being abused by his parents.  Truffaut had a very troubled childhood so it's not surprising the film would advocate for children's rights.

This is a good film, however I would not call it a masterpiece like The Wild Child.  Truffaut was like John Ford, he liked to work.  He was always developing film projects.  In reality not every film can be a masterpiece even for a great director like Truffaut.

The problem with Small Change is the lack of a strong central story for the audience to get involved in.  The abused child episode is only a minor part of the film.

Still, Small Change is made with a lot of skill.  Truffaut was a very good director of children, and in this film he had a lot of kids to deal with which I suspect at times must have been like herding cats. 

104 minutes.

1970 - THE WILD CHILD aka L'Enfant Sauvage is one of Truffaut's finest films.

A film that was probably as personal a project for Francois Truffaut as The 400 Blows.  The Wild Child is about a feral boy found in the French countryside and the attempts of a Dr. Itard played by Truffaut himself to reintegrate the child back into society

Francois Truffaut had a very troubled childhood and obviously related to the story of Victor of Aveyron.  Mostly due to parental neglect, Truffaut grew up an unwanted child himself.  He always felt that his education in literature, music and film saved him. 

Truffaut and his cinematographer Néstor Almendros, visual approach to this film was to reproduce the look of an old silent movie something like a D.W. Griffith pastoral film.  This is particularly effective with the old iris in/iris out transition technique to move from scene to scene.  Truffaut was also a highly skilled director of actors, particularly child actors.  Jean-Pierre Cargol as Victor The Wild Child gives a very fine performance that could have looked pretty ludicrous. 

Besides directing and playing one of the leads, Truffaut also wrote the screenplay.  An impressive accomplishment.

83 minutes

1966 - FAHRENHEIT 451, Truffaut's only but interesting Science Fiction film

Fahrenheit 451 was Francois Truffaut's only shot at an English language film.  The studio, the critics, the public and Truffaut himself were all disappointed with the finished film.  Watching this film 44 years later it looks pretty good to me. 

 

Universal Studios interfered throughout the film with Truffaut's ideas for his adaptation of the Bradbury book.  However Truffaut was a pretty tough guy and stuck to his principals facing down the wrath of the money men.  American studios throughout film history have always wanted to hire the hot foreign filmmakers then typically become frustrated with them when they don't conform to their studio notes.

The whole idea of hiring a person like Francois Truffaut is for him to make a "Truffaut" type film. Why employ Francois Truffaut in the first place if you don't want him to make his kind of film?  Truffaut was hardly some sort of artsy filmmaker screwball like Goddard.  He may have been an art house film director, but he was also a successful commercial director in France. 

Truffaut had his problems with the cast, his lead actor Oscar Werner  didn't get along at all during the filming.  Julie Christie was in her prime playing a double role as Werner's wife and a school teacher who lived down the street but that concept really didn't seem to come off.

Nicholas Roeg did his usual good job with the photography and Bernard Herrmann coming off being fired by Hitchcock for his Torn Curtain music, wrote one of his best scores for this film.  The film also had a lot of exciting montage scenes, Truffaut wasn't a film scholar for nothing.

Fahrenheit 451 is essentially a fable about a totalitarian society attempting to control it's citizen's by banning the reading of books.  The firemen in this film actually are firemen as they race around the countryside burning books.   The firetruck looks like a child's toy and Truffaut has a lot of little jokes  like having a fire pole where the firemen slide up instead of down.

The film was criticized at the time for being boring and undramatic, but the critics missed the point.  The whole idea in the film was that this was a society where thought and emotion was being repressed.  These concepts were dramatic enough and didn't need any more over wrought emoting which might have slid the who thing into some sort of weird science fiction melodrama. 

This film has been called Truffaut's attempt to make a Hitchcock like film, but the final scene in the snow with the book people is all Truffaut.   Hitchcock could have never achieved an ending scene like that.

 112 minutes.

1969 - THE SIREN OF THE MISSISSIPPI, Francois Truffaut's version of Vertigo

Truffaut the champion of Hitchcock, made 4 films which were sort of a tribute to Hitchcock with various degrees of success.  The Siren of Mississippi is one of them.   Truffaut admired Hitchcock, but he was temperamentally unsuited to make films like Hitchcock. Truffaut always had too much empathy for his characters. Hitchcock generally used the characters in his films to interact with his set pieces which kind of tended to make them seem like cardboard cutouts. Truffaut wasn't above improvising with his stars while making his films, something Hitchcock would never have done.

 

The Siren of the Mississippi is about a mail order bride who arrives on a tropical island to marry the owner of a cigarette factory. As it turns out she is not the person she appears to be from her letters and she ends up stealing her husband's money

From this starting point the story becomes a tale of obsessive love. Truffaut had major stars in this film, Jean Paul Belmondo and Catherine Denevue. He also had a bigger budget than usual and apparently shot in sequence, which is not the most economical way to make a film.

The film at times has that funny look that French films have when they shoot on location, kind of a hollow and bare,  it's almost like no one thought to buy any furniture for the rooms they are supposed to be living in.  It's still a Truffaut film so it's worth a viewing although it is something of a disappointment.

 123 minutes, written by Truffaut