HOMAGE TO FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
Bromwich, David
In a Paris street brakes screech, and a man is running: headlights skid across the dank walls of buildings. Staggering, the man escapes whatever was after him, and then finds a companion walking...
...but the new friend cannot help himself, he loves his wife...
...And it is not too much to say this tenderness is a grace Truffaut has made altogether his own—sometimes it is his saving grace...
...The new Truffaut film is called Day for Night and it has been received most ungratefully...
...Everyone loves an original, and no one likes to see originality abused...
...But not of movie art: it is the scraping and mending, the brainstorms that really hold water, the split-second openings into grandeur, in short, the "bit"-making tradition that appeals to Truffaut...
...My own reservation is quite different...
...Perhaps the strength is more public than it looks: in no other film is the shock-tempo so 97 perfectly adjusted to the vision of things, the condition of being a film so absolutely necessary to the ways-and-means of the story...
...SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER comes from a tradition of movies as surely as most great films have come from a tradition of painting or fiction...
...Just another man...
...Before it there was The 400 Blows, a sworn oath of loyalty to childhood, and after it two more masterpieces, Jules and Jim and The Wild Child...
...One is secondary, a brother of the hero, who carries the bad blood in his family and has fallen in with gangsters...
...Even amid such cruelty one is aware mostly of the tenderness...
...What spoils this film at the deepest level is the presence of Jean-Pierre Leaud, who has contributed to many recent Truffaut disasters...
...Truffaut has always spoken with great affection about the bits puttogether by Hitchcock and others, as if they were a value in themselves...
...There are other films, greater than Shoot the Piano Player and no doubt more perfect, but I cannot return to them as often...
...No one to blame, singularly or definitively, and yet the tragedy remains...
...Can anyone name a villain in Anna Karenina...
...Truffaut and Leaud are friends and that is fine...
...As in the cartoons, someone should knock Truffaut over the head with a sledge-hammer to make him see his actor clearly...
...At last, voices from a cafe, which the fugitive enters, the unlucky street forgotten...
...save yourself...
...Neither of the two characters will be important in the story this film has to tell...
...At the center of Truffaut's melancholy is a wish for delighted mayhem, yet in every comic interval he allows there is a secret gravity...
...At least partly, oddly, memorable: like Day for Night...
...He is very good on the accidental things in movies: the aging star, too nervous to end a scene walking through the right door, who drinks between takes and so gets more and more brilliant playing the bitch, but she cannot find that door...
...He fell in love with her the day their first child was born...
...He immortalizes the whole queer business in a manner something like Fitzgerald's in The Last Tycoon...
...It is about the tradition of movies...
...A friend...
...The fugitive listens attentively...
...But there is no time to say more and perhaps nothing more to say: the two men salute and pass into their separate lives...
...but in a very high degree Truffaut has been his own man...
...Unfortunately, Truffaut is going by a legitimate but offscreen impression of Leaud, whereas on-screen the actor is maddeningly coy or pretty-pretty...
...a climactic scene shot, for last-ditch reasons, in the snow—the sequence calls for murder on a busy street—and the poetic dimension it somehow gains as a result...
...Stay, he tells himself...
...Vignettes from the film-withinfilm: two couples on balconiesthat face each other—only the balconies are just clever scaffoldings erected 50 feet apart—passing the time, the older inviting the younger for a visit— but, mild surprise, this works because the older ones who are supposed to be more experienced in life are in fact more experienced in acting— until the middle-aged man waxes so enthusiastic that he nearly falls off, to be saved by his wife as they exchange mock-astonished glances and laugh across the way for their neighbors...
...She is repulsive to herself as she must be to him, he must leave the room and leave her forever...
...the minor effects, all of them—fake rain, fake bash-ups—with their larger meaning in a film that will be— larger...
...Or rather, why it makes the idea of formal perfection seem like an affront...
...98 MOVIES...
...He makes the announcement: "things aren't right for us anymore...
...now, kiss her...
...Indeed, an effort like Mississippi Mermaid, though exhilarating over stretches, may dissatisfy as a whole because its neoclassicism all too happily adopts Truffaut as the classic...
...That they are no one who has ever amazed himself remembering part of a bad film will deny...
...And what comes through is something of its congeniality...
...What on earth is happening...
...Alarmingly little, say a number of critics, and so saying dismiss Truffaut-as-critic when it is only the artist who ought to concern them...
...The world is awful because there are no villains...
...Yet the disorientation— for the characters, for the audience— does not leave anyone feeling disconnected...
...Another scene from Shoot the Piano Player: the hero, suddenly a famous pianist, finds that he can no longertolerate a wife plainly repelled by his own egotism...
...The other will not reappear...
...Ageless, it is now more than •a decade old...
...Half-way down a long corridor he has a change of heart and races back, but it is too late: she has leaped from the window and soon a little crowd of the curious will be gathering to examine a corpse...
...complaints about marriage, the usual grousing...
...In Day for Night Truffaut shows the how of this value but not the why...
...And there in the background is Truffaut with his endless variations on a single grand comment: how closely they jostle, the extremes of life, everything marvelous with everything most terrible...
...Something of its pain...
...Since this has been a love letter to Truffaut perhaps it can just be signed: grateful but still waiting...
...All these works have altered our notion of what a film can be...
...She responds by telling him what she had thought never to tell: that his break came, the week before their marriage, after she had agreed to sleep with the impresario dear to them both...
...But at bottom one realizes that what the film Day for Night portrays in the making is junk, and the question becomes: to what extent does Truffaut share in the recognition...
...This is lovely...
...When an artist convinces us of this it is a sign of greatness...
...I have described the opening scene of Shoot the Piano Player, a film one loves the way one loves a family, and I still do not know why the episode seems to me perfect...
...What if the original takes a day off and pays a conscious tribute to his first father, the conventional...
...About the will divided against itself he can speak with unexampled authority...
...Renoir is a detectable influence, together with early Godard...
...They have a conversation about love, a couple of swarthy faces, at this strange hour of the night, in the middle of nowhere...
...What one senses at the start is all that matters about Truffaut's passion for the world...
...Staggering, the man escapes whatever was after him, and then finds a companion walking at his side...
...She has tried to separate body and soul but she is still haunted...
...Thinking this he bolts from the room...
...Very largely, I would say...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
