VIETNAM MON AMOUR

...That is, in terms of sexual politics it does (cinematically it's the pits...

...Truffaut's appearances at the Film Festival each fall suggest too strongly the parallel between his life and this womanizer's in his film...

...If this were twenty years ago and the film were The Three Faces of Eve, the personality Terry would have to get rid of is the promiscuous one...

...Each of them deals with women in a way that earlier films would have dealt only with a man and a woman...

...This is because Goodbar, the one Hollywood blockbuster in the lot, is also the only one that comes close to saying something avant-garde...

...And not one of them is a real masterpiece...

...Now she's "together," as they say...

...For that reason, though the film is a depressing human document, it may be a hopeful sign aesthetically, a risk taken with both personal experience and art that will lead Truffaut to a new phase of his career...

...When Joyce's narrative came near the present, it ceased being a story at all and broke up into diary entries, little disconnected fragments of his life that looked forward to the free-associative form Ulysses would take later...

...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The films have become episodic, indeed almost anecdotal, and without any single, central human relationship for a subject...

...But as the film goes on, Bertrand's life comes to seem increasingly empty and his obsession with women to be just that: an obsession, a compulsive and ultimately self-destructive kind of behavior...

...One year he shows up with Catherine Deneuve, the next year it's Jacqueline Bisset, then Isabelle Adjani, then Brigitte Fossey, etc...

...Denner is a sallow, haggard, anxious man with a voice the wrong size for his body, whereas the real-life Truffaut seems far more handsome, poised and in proportion...

...and it's true...

...The difference seems much more pronounced in Brooks's film than it did in the novel...

...Goodbar...

...In the end Bertrand is bustling along a sidewalk, almost frantically going after first one woman, then another, when he becomes so absorbed he steps out into the street in pursuit of a woman on the other side and is hit by a car...

...Goodbar...

...It's only to say that he knows it's not, and this makes his film superior to others where the feeling is nobler, but less authentic...

...Thus the makers of Goodbar popularize feminism in the way that our culture always popularizes a serious radical idea...

...Since the film began with Bertrand's funeral, we have been expecting all along, I think, some denouement, some revelation in his death, or at least some dramatic climax to the story...

...This fragmenting approach to film narrative fits The Man Who Loved Women because it imparts to the film the emotional randomness which Truffaut apparently feels in Bertrand's life, and perhaps his own...

...As the autobiography that Truffaut began making with The 400 Blows draws nearer and nearer the present, it reminds me in a way of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist...

...It's not just independence she achieves, but solipsism...

...On the other hand, neither of the two films by women that are on the current list does much to encourage hope of this sort, and one of them, Varda's, is definitely among the stinkers...

...Another, The Turning Point, I gave a mention to in the last issue...

...What kills her is the jealousy of a homosexual who can't bear how happy and well-adjusted she is living this way—who can't stand the reproach of her abandoned, guiltless eroticism...

...When the only non-swinger in her life wants to take her away from all this and marry her, she rejects him with the defiant, triumphant assertion, "I'm not lonely, I'm just alone...

...Of the other films that are on my list, one about which more needs to be said is Looking for Mr...

...For it really goes beyond the most highly politicized feminism, beyond even radical lesbianism, in its advocacy of female independence...

...Six, of the films on my list are about relationships between women, and five of those go pretty far in cutting women off from— or perhaps just free from—men...

...Fifteen years ago, when Brigitte Bardot was still France's idea of a liberated woman, Agnes Varda made a truly great and sensitive film about womanhood, Cleo from 5 to 7. Now, when the times have caught up with that film, Varda makes a new one on the same subject that is, as used to be said, "pure pap...

...And she immediately becomes outgoing and relaxed, effective in her work, etc...

...Maybe the key to this mystery is that only two of the films on the list are by women as well as about them: when better films about women are made, women will make them—and not until then...

...But none goes as far as Goodbar...

...The emotional isolation that the singles bars provide pleases her...

...Something similar has been happening in Truffaut's last couple of films, where he has been thinking through current experience or observing the world around him rather than remembering the past...

...After all, no matter who you are, male or female, in order to make better films about women, you first have to make better films...

...It's hard to imagine, anyway, an independence more absolute and fierce than that of Goodbar's heroine, Terry (Diane Keaton), a woman who purposely lives without any emotional attachments at all...

...She is also miserable because the fact that she loves the guy permits him to use her as a doormat...

...But she solves her problem the other way round, by getting rid of her conventional, respectable self...

...And at least one more—One Sings, the Other Doesn't—is hardly worth mentioning at all...

...The difference is that Truffaut finds such a vacuous state comical and pitiful, and he has made a very personal film about it, at times almost a private one, where Brooks's is completely impersonal...

...In fact half of them are stinkers...

...When the film opens she has a split personality—shy and cringing in public, but wanton and kinky in the closet with her lover...

...The only film around that comes close is Truffaut's, which is about the solipsism of men as surely as Goodbar is about that of women...

...First they reduce it to an absurdity, then they celebrate a Black Mass over it...

...If there is any doubt left Bertrand is Truffaut, it is dispelled ~by the fact that throughout this film the character wears the same sort of leather jacket Truffaut himself habitually wore when he played himself—i.e., played a film director—in Day for Night...

...That's a misconception about her fate...

...This is not to say that Truffaut's attitude toward women is an admirable or a healthy one...

...While the women in Truffaut's film are all attractive and winning people, Bertrand really isn't...

...Nor does her way of life kill her...

...Truffaut never finds him(self) reprehensible, and many of the episodes in the film are high comedy...

...The ultra-militancy of the film is that Terry likes her life...

...This is a shame, too...

...There can be little doubt that the lead character, Bertrand, is Truffaut himself...

...At the hospital, he lurches from his bed at the sight of a pretty nurse, and dies on die floor of his room...

...But this death of his is purely arbitrary...

...But how Truffaut perceives his presumably glamorous and enviable life is indicated by his choice of Charles Denner to play Bertrand...

...It's remarkable when you consider that in one year we got Altaian's Three Women, Agnes Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't, Fred Zinnemann's Julia, Marta Mezzaros's Women, Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women, Herbert Ross's The Turning Point, Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire and Richard Brooks's Looking for Mr...

...Truffaut has in fact purposely disappointed the sort of expectations his opening creates in order to bring us gradually to a realization of just how arbitrary Bertrand's whole life has been...

...Out of all the films I just named, one—Three Women —was reviewed in this column when it came out...