Day for Night

I love the films of Francois Truffaut, the ones I've seen (and thanks to TCM, I've seen a couple more that I hadn't previously viewed, as well enjoyed a couple of old favorites). I like what his buddy Jean-Luc Godard did with cinema, don't get me wrong. But if I want to sit back and enjoy a good movie with subtitles that doesn't involve violent Hong Kong-set gunplay a 'la John Woo, it's Truffaut for me, hands down.

Like I said TCM has been showing Truffaut movies all this month on Friday nights...which, as next week is when August starts, means that if you didn't know about it already and wanted to see what I'm talking about, you might be out of luck (I'm sure all his stuff is on Netflix). I wasn't stoked about The Soft Skin when I saw it was on at eight to start one of the Friday nights, but it's not half bad (and the guy royally gets it in the end, a hallmark of all Truffaut movies where a "happy ending" usually proves elusive, but not as much as in Godard). I couldn't stay awake for Two English Girls, thanks in large part to Jules and Jim coming on before it. I doubt I'd care to go through all the trouble Jules and Jim do with Catherine (who's a little bat-shit crazy, truth be told), but I'll gladly watch them go through it for me. Shoot the Piano Player, one of my favorites, was on at four in the morning and, try that I might, I'm not getting up any earlier than seven-thirty on a Saturday.

Last night was, well, the last night, and it started off with what may be Truffaut's best film, Day for Night. It's a movie about a movie being made (in this case, a melodrama that wouldn't be much for any director's career, be he founding figure of an artistic movement like the French New Wave or just another Michael Bay wannabe), and most of the drama takes place away from the cameras filming the story in the movie, Meet Pamela. The lead actor is a spoiled brat, the main actress is a basket-case, the older male lead a closeted homosexual, and the secondary female lead an alcoholic who can't remember her lines. Guiding them is Truffaut himself, playing the director (Godard famously wrote Truffaut a letter about how the director was the only character who didn't sleep with anyone. Truffaut was well-known for sleeping with his leading ladies, he got pissed at Godard, and they never talked again). It's not snobby or pretentious like many Americans think foreign movies are (and truthfully, apart from some films that marry politics and cinema a little too fervently, a lot of foreign movies are just American except in language. Trust me, no one emulates the politics of Battleship Potemkin but they all crib from the Odessa Steppes scene. Does anyone steal anything from the movie Battleship? Doubt it). It's just a bunch of people stuck together, trying to make a movie (nothing artsy, just something that will return on its investment), and struggling with all the things that can go wrong. It's funny, too.

I think I respond to Truffaut more on an emotional level because he came from a situation I know personally (and which, when I find it out about a celebrity or artist, does make me more attune to what they're trying to do): he grew up without a father. Sure, the guy who gave him his name (his step-father) was around, when he and Truffaut's mother weren't mountain-climbing. Truffaut found out later that his real father was Jewish, information that could've been a death sentence in Nazi-occupied France. It was art that saved Truffaut, much as art saved another fatherless son, John Lennon. I understand that Godard might be more "important" or "influential" in film, and I do enjoy quite a few of his movies (Weekend deserves special mention for its cannibal hippies who dress like they stepped off the cover of Sgt. Pepper, but I wouldn't recommend it for family movie night). But I love Truffaut's movies, not all of them (The Bride Wore Black isn't much more than him trying to be Hitchcock, and it's not that good), but quite a few of them. They're sentimental at times, hokey at others, but for moments like Antoine Doinel riding the gravity-pull ride in The 400 Blows, Catherine Deneuve visiting her in-hiding husband in the bowels of their theater in The Last Metro, or the scene that immediately follows the cliched line "if I'm lying, may God strike my mother down" in Shoot the Piano Player, you can't beat Truffaut. It's a shame that he died so young, at fifty-two, of a brain tumor. He should be around now, making more movies. But the ones he did made are worth seeking out. Trust me on that one.