François Truffaut

(Cineplex streaming, December 2019) Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is such a landmark in prose science fiction that it deserves the best adaptation it can get. Unfortunately, the 2018 HBO movie wasn’t it (despite some clever ideas to update the premise to a digital age), and neither is François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation. There is an inherent coldness (for lack of a better word) to his Fahrenheit 451 that makes it difficult to embrace, even if you wholeheartedly embrace its message. The issues raised by the story are noble and admirable, as books becomes the symbol for intellectual curiosity, diverse thinking, deeper empathy and nuanced entertainment. Bradbury may have ruffled a few feathers late in life when he claimed that his book was less about censorship and more about the rise of TV, but this movie adaptation certainly goes in this direction, as characters as mesmerized by personalized entertainment telling them what to do and how to think. You would think that the 1960s vision of future technology and frankly bizarre gadgets would take away from the experience, but on the contrary the weird future-from-the-1960s ideas are a great reason to watch the film even today, as they add a fascinating layer of alternate paths not taken. Still, Truffaut mistakes a cold-minded society with cold behaviour from its citizens, and the result looks emotionally stunted. (We now know that thought control is arguably easier when people get into rages and feel as if they get to express themselves against something.) The vision shown here looks far too antiseptic, and it trips on itself when it tries to be a bit too literal about what’s best shown metaphorically in the original book. No, I’m not talking about the woman setting herself on fire when her books are threatened—that’s still effective. I am, however, thinking about the ending in which people become books and pass the words to others: that may have read poetically on the page with a generous dollop of allegory, but on the screen it just feels faintly ridiculous, and perhaps sadder than expected. (The HBO adaptation keeps the self-immolating woman but finds a better conclusion.)  I’m still reasonably happy about Fahrenheit 451—Truffaut was a fun filmmaker—but it’s not ideal, and its limitations take away from what should be a stronger message.

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I am a very indulgent viewer for movies that talk about movies, so it was almost inevitable that I’d have a soft spot for La nuit américaine, a rather fun film describing the filming of a French melodrama. It does feature clever meta-textual stuff that will make more sense the more you know about movies. It’s written and directed by François Truffaut, who also turns in a suitably sympathetic performance as the in-movie writer-director. The usual happens—production problems, neurotic actors, cast/crew hanky-panky, and serious accidents (of them, fatal, happens offscreen and is played for mostly laughs as if the actor had disappeared abruptly from La nuit américaine itself). It’s also a look at early-1970s studio-based filmmaking, with Truffaut explicitly closing on a mournful note that movies should not go to the street and entirely abandon their own specialized filmmaking environment. Compared to other French New Wave movie, it’s surprisingly funny—although, by 1973, you can make an argument that the New Wave was becoming undistinguishable from the rest of the filmmaking ocean. It’s generally about the relationship that the cast and crew have with making movies—as one character says, “I’d leave a man for a movie, but I’d never leave a movie for a man”—no wonder Hollywood loved this film and gave it an Academy Award. (An interesting bit of trivia is that it was nominated for Oscars two years in a row: first winning the foreign film award for 1973, then nominated for three more Academy Awards for its 1974 American run.)  La nuit américaine may or may not have aged not-so-well—I suspect that while it remains charming and fun today, it’s not quite a fresh or new or revelatory as it must have seemed to an audience decades before lengthy making-of movies (sometimes more interesting than the movies they depict) became such a staple of DVDs and online promotional material.

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Sitting down to watch Les 400 coups for the first time can be imposing if you’re coming at it from the cinephile angle. It’s not only legendary writer-director François Truffaut’s first feature film: It’s considered his best film. It’s a retelling of his own difficult childhood. It’s a defining movie of the French Nouvelle Vague, of French cinema, of world cinema. It’s widely and wildly acclaimed, often included in the shorter best-movies-of-all-time lists and a favourite of many top-notch directors. With hype like that, it can feel churlish to watch the film, acknowledge its qualities, but then wonder about the fuss. Part of the disconnect, I suspect, has to do with the objectives of the movie. Unlike other movies with genre-driven goals or overt cinematic ambitions, Truffaut sets out to deliver a carefully focused character-driven story, with small stakes and matter-of-fact cinematography. Our protagonist is a juvenile delinquent, but this is not a crime movie. It’s not exactly a triumphant film—but it ends with escape and one of the most celebrated sequences in 1950s French cinema. Still, its specificity is the key to its universality—while Les 400 coups is rarely pulse-pounding, it gradually makes our battered young protagonist understandable until we can sympathize with him. His parents are guilty of severe neglect, so he takes to the streets as a learning experience. I’m not that interested in that kind of material and there are several Truffaut movies that I like a lot more (most notably Jules & Jim, La nuit américaine and parts of Fahrenheit 451). But if I don’t quite get what makes the film so acclaimed, I also suspect that it’s because there have been a lot of similar movies about likable teenage hoodlums since 1959—the success of European neorealism was to open the doors for many similar features, but if you’ve seen those films before the original, the source won’t have the same impact. Still, I’m glad that I’ve seen Les 400 Coups, and as a little bit more than another checkmark on a list.