Tag Archives: Francois Truffaut

It was inevitable after reading Marked Woman I’d catch at least one movie it discussed, which turned out to be THE RED KIMONA (1925) which I think is “kimono” misspelled. This begins where many sex-worker sagas climax, with protagonist Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) murdering the man who seduced her, swore he loved her, then pimped her out.

When the all-male jury hears her story, they acquit her, then a shallow reformer (“She found social work socially useful.”) takes Gabrielle into her household to redeem the fallen woman. It doesn’t go well as there are few employees willing to hire a woman with Gabrielle’s backstory — when she leaves the reformer’s house, will she have any choice but to return to sex work? Can her true love reach her in time (I never thought the cliche of racing to the airport before someone leaves, or in this case the train station, went back this far). This starts really slow but the pathos increases effectively as it goes along. “‘I love you’ — sometimes as beautiful as a prayer, sometimes a lie.”

Happily married Gerard Depardieu is knocked for a loop when a couple moves in to the neighboring house and THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (1981) turns out to be former lover Fanny Ardant. The couple had a trainwreck relationship years before their current marriages; fortunately now that they’re older, wiser and married they can certainly keep their old passions in check … right? Very much in Truffaut’s familiar mode of troubled marriages and people with uncontrollable emotions, but he’s very good in that vein. “Life has more imagination than us.”

Tragically Truffaut died in 1984, a mere 52 years old. That makes huis last movie CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS (1983), which shows his fondness for Hitchcock but in the light-hearted mode of The Lady Vanishes. Ardant returns, now in the role of Barbara, a secretary whose boss (Jean-Louis Trintignant) appears to have murdered the man who cuckolded him, then the wife caught between them. Ardant, however, becomes convinced there’s more to the story; unraveling the tangles alongside her boss she explores a night-club and a covert brothel, assaults a priest and finally cracks the case. It’s not a classic, though it is very Truffaut, for example, in the woman obsessed murderer (“Women are magic! You will not understand my motive because I never belonged to the land of men!”); overall a satisfactory final film, though I’ll always wish he’d had more years to make movies. “It wasn’t me who said the priest looked like a killer.”

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I had no idea THE SAINT (2017) existed until this blog post at Atomic Junk Shop. Unlike the 1997 Val Kilmer film, this one clearly knows the Leslie Charteris source material and makes good use of it.

Adam Rayner’s Simon Templar is Charteris’ “Robin Hood of Modern Crime,” shown in the opening scenes thwarting a terrorist scheme to buy a nuke, stealing the gold bullion intended for the seller and donating it to charity. He’s helped at a distance by his Woman in the Chair, Patricia Holm (Eliza Dushku), a tech whiz who we learn later in the story can fight like hell too.

This was originally conceived as a TV pilot which is why there’s so many loose ends such as the implication Simon’s family are literal Knights Templar engaged in a war with the mysterious “Brotherhood,” the multiple cops on Simon’s trail and Patricia and Simon not having done it yet. Like John Carter it’s better than I ever expected — perhaps its failure to launch a series is a sign that Simon Templar remains a “dad hero.” “I didn’t cheat, father — I stole.”

What if Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night had taken place in occupied Paris? That’s my log-line description of Truffaut’s most successful film (critically and commercially), THE LAST METRO (1980). Catherine Deneuve is an actor trying to keep the theater open (Parisians under Vichy flocked to movies and theater as an escape from their troubles) despite her Jewish playwright/director husband having fled the city. She can’t let anyone know that far from fleeing he’s holed up in the basement and giving directorial notes on the play she’s trying to stage.

Enter Gerard Depardieu, at the time known for leather-jacketed tough-guy characters on screen (and according to one commentary track, dismissing Truffaut’s film’s as mediocre), the play’s new leading man and a notorious lech. In an American WW II film the focus would be on getting the man in the basement to safety; this film devotes as much screen time to the struggles to get the play on, from Deneuve/Depardieu friction (the idea of them as lovers comes too out of the blue for me) to the anti-semitic critic watching it like a hawk. While the ending doesn’t work (I may like it better if I rewatch some day) this is overall an excellent, very Truffaut film. It might double-bill well with Jack Benny’s To Be or Not To Be as another story of actors vs. fascists. “I’m trying to feel Jewish.”

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Working through Francois Truffaut’s films, I discovered his next film, A Gorgeous Girl Like Me isn’t available streaming nor DVD (at least not one that will play on my BluRay) and so moved on to Day for Night (1973).

Truffaut plays a movie director struggling to complete his romantic drama Meet Pamela (boy brings girl home, boy loses girl to his married dad) on time and under budget with the threat of losing his insurance floating over his head. He has to deal star Jacqueline Bissett’s mental-health issues, a male lead (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played the pre-teen Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows) with all the maturity of the adult Doinel, plus routine challenges such as actors who constantly forget their lines or suffer panic attacks. A charming character study that gave French star Nathalie Baye (I crushed on her a lot back when I first saw this) her breakout role as the director’s sidekick (based on Truffaut’s own collaborator Suzanne Schiffman); it’s affection for movies makes me suggest Cinema Paradiso as a good double bill. “The way to make money today is in real estate, not movies.”

Frank Capra’s LADY FOR A DAY (1933) is another pick from Leonard Maltin, based on a Damon Runyon story about Apple Annie (May Robson), a once talented pianist tragedy and the Depression have turned into street peddlar with a drinking problem. The daughter she sent away for a European education years ago is now coming to visit with her aristocratic fiancee — holy crap, what will happen when she learns her mother’s been lying about her elegant, upscale life in all her letters.

Not to worry: slick gambler Dave the Dude (Warren William, described not inaccurately as the poor man’s John Barrymore) considers Annie his good luck charm. Nagged by his girlfriend, Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell) — based on nightclub hostess Texas Guinan I imagine — Dave begins pulling strings and calling in favors so that he can present Annie as the sophisticate she’s been posing as.

The premise is old hat now (maybe it was old hat even back then) and doesn’t make sense — what’s going to happen when Annie’s invited to the wedding (will she bring her pretend husband, Guy Kibbee, along?). I don’t really mind; as Maltin says, it’s sincerely sweet in a way more recent movies rarely are and Capra makes me believe in it. “That’s one reason i never go to Providence.”

Isabelle Adjani gives a spectacular performance in Truffaut’s THE STORY OF ADELE H (1975), arriving in Halifax where she gives multiple different stories about herself before we learn what’s really going on. Adele is the daughter of the legendary French writer Victor Hugo (now known mostly for Les Miserables, then known at least as much for opposing Napoleon III overthrowing the French Republic), seduced by a British officer which has turned her into a relentless stalker. She’s followed hm to Canada where she’s determined to marry him or sleep with him or pay his gambling debts — anything so he’ll be with her in some fashion. The officer is horrified by this development but is there anything he can do to divert her relentless attention? Like Mississippi Mermaid this feels like an odd mix of historical romance and noir — it feels like this should end with the lieutenant getting a bullet to the brain if the historical facts only allowed it. Good, in any case. “I’m very sorry, sir — there’s no-one at home.”

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Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of READY PLAYER ONE (2018) works much better than the Ernest Cline book, though not so much better I was glued to the screen. The story of Wade (Tye Sheridan) hunting the McGuffin that will give him — or a corrupt corporation — control of the massively immersive Oasis gameworld works much better when the visuals do the work of a page or two of narrative about Awesome Eighties Pop Culture. That said, making Artemis’ (Olivia Cooke) disfiguring birth mark so trivial feels like an annoying change to make her better eye candy. “There are only three things in this world I hate — steampunk, pirates and tabbouleh.”

Francois Truffaut’s TWO ENGLISH GIRLS (1971) feels like a gender-switched Jules and Jim at times, telling the story in telling the story of a young Frenchman’s lifelong fascination with two British sisters, the mildly repressed Ann and the more uptight Mildred. Enthralling but slow; I suspect this will improve on rewatching (I’d have ordered the DVD but there doesn’t appear to be one for American BluRay players). “How can I choose between virtue and vice when I only know virtue?”

Like Ready Player One, CRAZY RICH ASIANS (2018) works better than the book: Kevin Kwan’s prose detailing the wealth of the Young family took pages to cover what a single image does on-screen. The core story is the same: economics professor Rachel (Constance Chu) agrees to become boyfriend Nick’s (Henry Golding) plus-one to a family wedding back in Singapore only to discover they’re rich beyond the dreams of avarice and Nick’s mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) considers Rachel nothing but a crass gold-digger who’ll distract Nick from his duty to return home and run the family holdings.

The cast, including Gemma Chan as Astrid and Awkwafina as Rachel’s BFF, adds a lot to the story and some of the subplots, such as Astrid’s marital problems, get resolved better. That said, I don’t think they resolve the fundamental conflict of Rachel’s job in New York vs. Nick’s duties to his clan. Enjoyable nonetheless. “Great — I was really going for that ‘lucky baby-maker’ vibe.”

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For last weekend’s date-night movie I picked THEODORA GOES WILD (1936), a rom-com starring Irene Dunne as a small-town spinster who’s penned a bestselling scandalous novel under a pen name because she can’t bear the scandal if the truth gets out in her home town. Enter Melvyn Douglas as a free-spirited painter determined to push Dunne out of her comfort zone and make her embrace life — a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, even if Douglas is too mellow to be manic.

[Edited to add] Except when Douglas has finally jolted Dunne free of her staid life and she comes to find him in New York, it turns out he’s not so free-spirited. He’s stuck in a loveless marriage because divorce would ruin his father’s upcoming shot at the governorship. He’s got to wait a couple of years before he’s free — but Dunne’s now determined to jar him as much as he shook her up. It’s that surprise shift that makes the movie memorable as well as fun. “Do you remember that typeface we used when war was declared?”THE WILD CHILD (1970 is Francois Truffaut’s story of the Wild Boy of Averoigne, a feral child (Jean Pierre Cargol)caught by hunters and turned over to a local doctor (Truffaut). The doctor’s mentor considers the boy a lunatic fit only for the asylum; the doctor stubbornly sets out to prove the can learn enough to function in society or at least prove his humanity. As you can see from that terrified face above, it’s not easy.

I’d like to say something deep about this but it doesn’t provoke any deep thoughts (here’s Roger Ebert’s if you want them). That’s not a veiled insult or anything — I found this completely fascinating and well watching. “To obtain a less ambiguous result, I must do an abominable thing.”

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