The Essentials: Francois Truffaut’s Best Films

“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 for a flashback. It should feel like classic second album syndrome, indulgent and self-involved, but there’s something deeply infectious and enjoyable about the picture — having got 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 if Godard had grown up on the Marx Brothers and Ernst Lubitsch, and while it’s critical and commercial failure meant that the director never really repeated his experiment, the film’s DNA is present in so much of what follows.

“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 in truth, “Jules et Jim” is a remarkably adventurous and complex film, technically and narratively, and it’s one which Truffaut arguably never bettered. “Jules et Jim” was shot by Raoul Coutard, Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematographer throughout the ’60s, as well as Costa-Gavras‘ on “Z”, and it’s watching this film that you realize it was Coutard, more than any of the New Wave directors (and in spite of their allegiance to auteur theory), 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 was 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 face 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. “Jules et Jim”, although it only features a few moments of newsreel from the trenches, 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. And in that sense 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.

“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 Twelve,” 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, memorably, being 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, now 24, has grown into a hugely impressive performer, with some deft coming timing, but also 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.