François Truffaut
A lifelong cinephile, François Truffaut first made his cinematic mark as a fiery, contentious critic for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, denouncing the French film industry’s bloated “tradition of quality” and calling for the director to be redefined as the auteur, or individual author, of the film. Truffaut then became an auteur himself, starting with The 400 Blows, which won him the best director award at Cannes and led the French new-wave charge. The 400 Blows remains Truffaut’s seminal film, yet he continued to reinvigorate cinema throughout the sixties, with such thrilling works as Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim. Truffaut also continued to follow the adventures of 400 Blows protagonist Antoine Doinel—embodied by Jean-Pierre Léaud—through the seventies (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run), while directing such other classics as Day for Night and The Last Metro, which displayed his undying love for cinema and life. His own life was tragically cut short at the age of fifty-two.
François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut’s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs.
The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s chronicle of the ardent, anachronistic Antoine Doinel, Bed and Board plunges his hapless creation once again into crisis. Expecting his first child and still struggling to find steady employment, Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) involves himself in a relationship with a beautiful Japanese woman that threatens to destroy his marriage. Lightly comic, with a touch of the burlesque, Bed and Board is a bittersweet look at the travails of young married life and the fine line between adolescence and adulthood.
Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, legendary director François Truffaut’s early masterpiece Jules and Jim charts the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession over the course of twenty-five years. Jeanne Moreau stars as Catherine, the alluring and willful young woman whose enigmatic smile and passionate nature lure Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) into one of cinema’s most captivating romantic triangles. An exuberant and poignant meditation on freedom, loyalty, and the fortitude of love, Jules and Jim was a worldwide smash upon its release in 1962 and remains as audacious and entrancing today.
Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve star as members of a French theater company living under the German occupation during World War II in François Truffaut’s gripping, humanist character study. Against all odds—a Jewish theater manager in hiding; a leading man who’s in the Resistance; increasingly restrictive Nazi oversight—the troupe believes the show must go on. Equal parts romance, historical tragedy, and even comedy, The Last Metro (Le dernier métro) is Truffaut’s ultimate tribute to art overcoming adversity.
Antoine Doinel strikes again! In the final chapter of François Truffaut’s saga, we find Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), now in his thirties, convivially concluding his marriage, enjoying moderate success as a novelist, and clinging to his romantic fantasies. The newly single Doinel finds a new object of his affections in Sabine, a record store salesgirl whom he pursues with the fervid belief that without love, one is nothing. Along the way, he renews his acquaintance with previous loves and confronts his own chaotic past. In Love on the Run, Antoine Doinel is still in love and because he’s still in love, he’s still alive.
François Truffaut is drunk on the possibilities of cinema in this, his most playful film. Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour, in a triumph of hangdog deadpan) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair. Loaded with gags, guns, clowns, and thugs, this razor-sharp homage to the American gangster film is pure nouvelle vague.
Jean-Pierre Léaud returns in the delightful Stolen Kisses, the third installment in the Antoine Doinel series. It is now 1968, and the mischievous and perpetually love-struck Doinel has been dishonorably discharged from the army and released onto the streets of Paris, where he stumbles into the unlikely profession of private detective and embarks on a series of misadventures. Whimsical, nostalgic, and irrepressibly romantic, Stolen Kisses is Truffaut’s timeless ode to the passion and impetuosity of youth.