1980 Week: The Last Metro

          Polished and sophisticated but also a bit on the trifling side, the World War II drama The Last Metro was the final major international success for François Truffaut, a titan of the French New Wave and one of the most gifted storytellers ever to work in cinema. Telling the story of theater people who defy the Nazis in occupied Paris, The Last Metro is among Truffaut’s most visually beautiful films, thanks to luminous photography by the great Néstor Almendros, and it pairs French-cinema grande dame Catherine Deneuve with Gérard Depardieu, then a rising star of Gallic films. All participants operate at the height of their powers, creating a movie that’s humane, intelligent, romantic, and suspenseful. The Last Metro is bloated at 131 minutes, and the ending is so tidy that it makes much of what came before seem inconsequential. Yet The Last Metro is unusual among movies about occupied France inasmuch as the material is not inherently depressing or tragic. The Last Metro is an inspirational story about survivors who refuse to compromise their principles, thereby getting the last laugh on their jack-booted oppressors. It’s not quite a feel-good WWII movie, but it’s certainly not a feel-bad WWII movie.

          When the picture opens, actor Bernard Granger (Depardieu) arrives for an audition at a theater operated by the beautiful actress Marion Steiner (Deneuve), who manages the acting troupe and the building because her husband, acclaimed director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), is Jew who fled Paris to escape the Nazis. Or so it seems. Turns out Lucas is living in seclusion, using the theater’s basement as a hideout. Once Marion begins rehearsals for a new play in which she costars with Bernard, Lucas listens to their acting through pipes carrying sound from the stage to the basement. At night, once everyone else has left the building, Marion joins Lucas to get notes on the day’s work. Lots of things conspire to disrupt this delicate situation. French citizens collaborating with the Nazis discover clues suggesting that Lucas never left the country. Lucas gets stir-crazy in the basement, threatening to risk capture by leaving his hideout. And Bernard becomes romantically attracted to Marion, creating a complex triangle while the actors play lovers onstage.

          Despite being written, directed, and acted with the utmost care and refinement, The Last Metro has the feel of a soap opera, with characters pursuing crisscrossing agendas while guarding dangerous secrets. And while the pulpy nature of the material probably contributed to the film’s popularity, demanding viewers can’t help but expect more given the level of talent involved and the sprawling length of the movie. Taken for what it is, however, The Last Metro goes down smoothly. Deneuve is so exquisite to behold that she commands the screen even when she’s doing nothing, Depardieu hits the right note of brash arrogance, and Bennent is believable as a high-minded artiste. As always, Truffaut conjures an immersive sense of time and place.

The Last Metro: GROOVY

Two English Girls (1971)

          Exploring the hurtfulness of male caprice and the inner lives of complicated women with a novelistic style, François Truffaut’s Two English Girls is intelligent and meticulously constructed, though that can be said of nearly all of Truffaut’s films. Yet Two English Girls lacks the special fire that enlivens Truffaut’s chilly storytelling approach in his best pictures. As he evolved, Truffaut largely eschewed the guerilla-style filmmaking of his debut feature, The 400 Blows (1959), opting for polished classicism that prioritized character and plot over bravura camerawork. Whenever he got his teeth into a great story, this modality was effective, helping viewers get lost in the thickets of provocative narratives. In projects such as Two English Girls, the mannered storytelling has a nullifying effect, as if the movie is a pretty picture contained by a frame instead of something more immersive. One cannot fault Two English Girls for its acting, cinematography, or editing, et cetera, but the total experience is weirdly bloodless.

          Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, the picture opens in turn-of-the-century Paris. Handsome young Claude Roc (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his mother receive a visitor from England, Ann Brown (Kate Markham). She’s charming and lovely and worldly, so Claude happily accepts her invitation to visit the Brown family in Wales. Once Claude arrives, Ann tries to forge a romantic match between the Frenchman and Ann’s peculiar sister, Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). Despite her eccentricities, Muriel makes her way into Claude’s heart, but then Claude’s mother—fearing the possibility of an inappropriate mate for her only son—demands the couple spend a year apart. The remainder of the picture explores the impact of the separation, which has a liberating effect on Claude but leads to heartbreak in the lives of the Brown sisters.

          Two English Girls tells a small story, and the idiosyncratic nuances that Truffaut inserts into the movie aren’t quite enough to make the picture feel special. Scenes of Muriel talking directly to the camera seem false, and the intrusive narration—spoken by Truffaut—drains the movie of subtlety by providing overly detailed explanations for what people feel and think during important scenes. It’s all very clinical, but not to any notably meritorious end; simply letting the characters and story breathe would have delivered something more intimate and resonant. Still, the technical execution is up to Truffaut’s usual high standards, and the performances are generally good. Léaud, best known for playing Truffaut’s cinematic alter ego in the Antoine Doinel movies, offers an opaque screen presence, so it’s hard to know whether we’re meant to perceive Claude as a cad, a naïf, or something in between. Markham is alluring in a buttoned-up sort of way, and Tendeter is fairly good at conveying quiet desperation. Alas, the moments when her character’s repressed emotions burst forth underwhelm, like so many other elements of this ultimately forgettable film.

Two English Girls: FUNKY

Small Change (1976)

          Others may have different takes on his style, but to my way of thinking, François Truffaut was essentially a novelist who used film frames instead of words, because his best films combine innovative film techniques with traditional literary devices to convey painful and sweet truths about the human condition. As such, Truffaut’s work was often best when he locked into the perspective of a unique protagonist or, as in the case of romantic-triangle stories, an interlocked group of protagonists. Perhaps that’s why Small Change didn’t work for me. In addition to being a gimmick picture, since all the major characters are children, it’s an ensemble movie without a strong overarching storyline. To belabor the analogy to fiction writing, Small Change is like a set of loosely connected stories rather than the unified statement of a novel. Some of the picture’s vignettes are interesting, whether funny or sad or a combination of both sensations, while others make less of an impact. But the lack of truly complicated characters—an occupational hazard when exploring the lives of people whose personalities have not yet fully formed—means that Truffaut can’t really do what he does best. That said, even mediocre Truffaut is better than the finest work lesser filmmakers can render.

          Tracking the loosely connected lives of several children who attend a school in Thiers, France, Small Change—originally titled L’argent de poche, or Pocket Money—has moments of great humanity. The subplot of a poor child hiding the truth about his life in an abusive household is handled with sensitivity, and the subplot of a wide-eyed boy nurturing a crush on his friend’s sexy mom is playful and restrained. Perhaps most interesting scenes are those depicting the adventures of a boy who must aid in his paralyzed father’s caretaking. Yet some moments seem like clips from another movie. In one such scene, an infant climbs onto a windowsill to chase after a cat, and then several bystanders watch in horror from several stories below as the child tumbles from the window. The resolution of the scene makes zero sense dramatically or logically, although it sorta-kinda serves Truffaut’s theme about the resilience of children as compared to the selfishness and stupidity of adults. Small Change isn’t a bad picture by any measure, and some viewers will undoubtedly find it affecting and unique. For me, Small Change came across like a rhythm in search of a melody—I felt too strongly the absence of a distinctive central character, whose journey might have given clarity and focus to the picture’s meandering episodes.

Small Change: FUNKY

The Green Room (1978)

          A dark character study extrapolated from the writings of Henry James, François Truffaut’s The Green Room tells a twisted love story through the prism of grief so powerful it compels a man to all but withdraw from the human experience. Adding to the tragedy of the piece is the irony that loss brings the protagonist into intimate contact with a woman who is broken in the same way, but not to the same degree; therefore, the promise of renewal hovers over a story about a man resigned to oblivion. Tackling these grim themes in his characteristically literary style, Truffaut crafts an experience that is sometimes more intellectual than it is visceral, so some viewers will find the piece icy and perhaps even impenetrable. For those willing to accept Truffaut’s disinterest in striking crowd-pleasing chords while performing this particular sonata, The Green Room is intriguing.

          Set in the 1920s, the picture stars Truffaut as Julien Davenne, a World War I veteran haunted not only by the war but also by the death of his beloved wife. While working as an editor for a newspaper that has fallen from popularity—one of the film’s myriad metaphors representing decay—Julien pursues his real passion, which is building a shrine to his late spouse. The “green room” of the title includes photographs and souvenirs, so on a spiritual level, the room represents a space where Julian can imbibe his wife’s essence until he’s intoxicated. Wallowing inside the green room is the only pleasure that Julien allows himself, because the rest of his life is fraught. He shares lodgings with a housekeeper, whom he tasks with errands that Julien considers beyond his emotional capacity, and with a deaf-mute boy, whom Julien traumatizes by showing slides depicting war dead.

          The implication is that Julien has disappeared so deeply into an abyss of mourning that he’s like a black hole sucking other objects in with the force of his gravitational pull. Julien even extends animus beyond the grave, because when a luminary of his former acquaintance dies, Julien alienates his publisher by writing a eulogy that takes the form of a poison-pen letter. The only glimmer of brightness in Julien’s life is his relationship with Cécilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye), an assistant at an auction house. He meets her while reviewing estate-sale artifacts in order to find something that once belonged to his wife. Later, once Julien discovers that Cécilia is also paralyzed by loss, he draws her into a plan for building a grander shrine than the green room, a massive vault honoring all of Julien’s friends and loved ones who have died.

          The Green Room is simultaneously obvious and subtle. On a surface level, the film is a scientific study of the way grief can conquer life if given fertile ground in which to plant its bitter seeds. On a deeper level, however, the film is about human connection. One gets the sense, for instance, that Julien exhausted his full measure of love while building a world with his wife, so her death snuffed a flame inside of him. Seen from that perspective, the arc of Julien’s relationship with Cécilia has a cosmic quality, if one is willing to belabor a metaphor—she’s a celestial object drawn by the magnetism of the aforementioned black hole, and she not only resists the invitation to disappear but also tries to find a spark inside the dead star that she can reignite.

The Green Room: GROOVY

Day for Night (1973)

          Easily one of the best movies ever made about the process of making movies, this Oscar-winning François Truffaut feature isn’t precisely the love letter to cinema that one might expect from a critic-turned-director. Rather, it’s a prismatic examination of the gypsy lifestyle shared by movie professionals, who form intimate bonds during the crucible of production only to separate when the shooting stops. Moreover, by giving equal screen time to the private lives of his characters, Truffaut playfully dramatizes the way artists weave illusion into their “normal” activities. For instance, Truffaut appears in the film as a director who is not named François Truffaut but who shares many qualities with his real-life avatar. The film character, Ferrand, is a partially deaf cineaste telling a story about a romantic triangle, and one of Truffaut’s early masterpieces—1962’s Jules and Jim—is a quintessential triangle story.

          In Day for Night, which is named for the practice of shooting daylight scenes with filters so they appear as if they were shot in the evening (a tidy metaphor representing the theme of illusion), Ferrand struggles to complete a movie called Meet Pamela. The movie-within-the-movie is a melodrama about a young man whose bride falls in love with her new father-in-law. Yet the interpersonal fireworks happening around the production are even more intense than those being captured by Ferrand’s camera. His leading lady, British actress Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset), is recovering from a nervous breakdown. His supporting players, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and Severine (Valentina Cortese) are former lovers whose reunion sends Severine into an emotional spiral. Ferrand’s young leading man, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is an impulsive romantic whose bed-hopping causes problems throughout production. And so on.

          In lesser hands, this material could have devolved into soap opera. Truffaut ensures that never happens, because he moves gracefully between farcical scenes of narcissistic tantrums, tender passages depicting sensitive people in crisis, and vivid vignettes illustrating the myriad things that go wrong (and right) on movie sets every day. The crowd shot botched by one wayward extra. The dialogue scene thrown off-kilter because a drunken actress can’t remember which door to use for her exit. The crew member who abruptly quits because his mother falls ill. Truffaut’s character sums up the magical madness with his voiceover: “Before starting, I hope to make a fine movie. The problems begin and I aim lower. I hope to make the movie . . . period.”

          Filled with amusing mishaps, believable emotions, painful complications, and precious moments capturing the joy of creation, Day for Night underscores the notion that it’s a miracle any film is ever finished, given the thousand distractions that arise along the way. Further, Day for Night is elegantly made and wonderfully acted. Bisset, who performs much of her role in French, gives a credible turn as a troubled soul, and she’s also at her most mesmerizingly beautiful. Cortese, who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, is entertainingly overwrought, while Aumont has fun at the expense of movie-star vanity. And Truffaut, who occasionally acted in his own films (as well as the 1977 Steven Spielberg epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind), gives an unsurprisingly authentic turn playing a version of himself.

          Released in America both in dubbed and subtitled versions (the subtitled being preferable), Day for Night won the Oscar for 1973’s Best Foreign Film.

Day for Night: RIGHT ON

The Man Who Loved Women (1977)

          While not a sensualist by any stretch, the great French director François Truffaut had a way with stories about sex. Throughout his career, in films ranging from Jules and Jim (1962) to this picture and beyond, Truffaut examined lust through a uniquely cerebral prism. As a result, his sexually themed movies are among the most intelligent cinematic explorations of carnality ever made. So, while The Man Who Loved Women is partially a dry comedy about a middle-aged Frenchman who accrues an extraordinary number of lovers, it’s also a plaintive character study about a man who substitutes physical love for emotional love. The Man Who Loved Women blends humor, pathos, and romance in surprising ways. The movie’s too long, the tonal mixture isn’t completely satisfying, and some aspects of the lead character remain mysterious to the end. In a lesser film, these issues would be flaws, perhaps fatal ones. But in The Man Who Loved Women, these issues manifest like idiosyncrasies—working through the narrative bumps is the price of admission for discovering the many gifts the picture offers.

          The story begins with the funeral of a man named Bertrand Morane, which is attended by dozens of beautiful women. One of them, Geneviève (Brigitte Fossey), marvels at the deceased’s ability to attract women, and this triggers a change in the movie’s point of view. Thereafter, at least until a return to Geneviève’s perspective at the end of the story, the movie is presented through the eyes of Bertrand (Charles Denner), who appears in every scene and also provides a luxuriant voiceover that articulates the particulars of his personality. A middle-aged lab technician living in the small city of Montpelier, Bertrand has been fascinated by beautiful women his whole life. As a devoted “leg man,” he spends his free time walking the streets, his eyes forever drawn this way and that by sets of beautiful stems. Bertrand takes absurd lengths to meet the women who catch his fancy, always behaving as a gentleman and nearly always consummating his flirtations.

          Truffaut, who co-wrote the movie in addition to directing, presents Bertrand as simultaneously childlike and sophisticated. His preoccupation with women seems innocent since he places ladies on such a high pedestal, and since he recognizes his inability to maintain serious relationships. He’s all about the chase, but he never uses subterfuge as anything but an icebreaker, after which he comes clean. Truffaut prudently steers clear of any implication that Bertrand’s a remarkable lover, since the point of the story is that Bertrand revels in female companionship; his trysts are idylls that enrich his soul rather than conquests. As the story progresses through various episodes, including brief flashbacks to Bertrand’s childhood, Bertrand writes a book about his love life, which eventually leads to an affair with his editor, Geneviève (the woman from the funeral). The discoveries Bertrand makes about himself by spending time with Geneviève create a rich, tragicomic context for the film’s final movements.

         The Man Who Loved Women is brisk at times, but it mostly proceeds at a meditative pace, communicating and dramatizing the unusual life experience of a man who uses sex as socialization (and, to some degree, as therapy). In the end, the film sketches a tantalizing picture of a truly singular individual, while also manifesting—through the presence of dozens of lovely actresses—Bertrand’s magical vision of the world as a place overflowing with feminine beauty and feminine complexity. The Man Who Loved Women is more droll than funny, and it’s frequently serious, so in terms of cinematic texture, it’s as eccentric as its protagonist. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the film’s American remake, released in 1983. Starring Burt Reynolds and directed by Blake Edwards—whose approach to bedroom farce compares poorly to Truffaut’s—the American version has little to recommend except a parade of beautiful actresses, including Julie Andrews, Kim Basinger, Marilu Henner, and Sela Ward.

The Man Who Loved Women: GROOVY

The Wild Child (1970)

          Despite being inextricably linked with the French New Wave, director François Truffaut’s was much more of a classicist that some of his peers—notably provocateur Jean-Luc Godard—so it’s unsurprising that a handful of his films are drawn from obscure historical events. Clearly, Truffaut was just as comfortable looking backward for subject matter as he was looking forward for stylistic innovations. The Wild Child—originally titled L’enfant sauvage—represents his eclecticism well. The film’s story is set in the 18th century, and Truffaut utilizes many tropes associated with early cinema, such as black-and-white cinematography and the in-camera effect known as the iris. Thematically, however, The Wild Child is a thoroughly modern piece, since the narrative explores questions related to the comparative values of contemporary “civilized” society and primeval nature-based existence. (Although the film is not overtly presented as an allegorical commentary on the flower-child movement, such implications can be inferred.)

          Based on a real-life event, The Wild Child tells the story of a preadolescent boy who was discovered living the woods of rural France after an unknown period of years, and then taken into the home a humane scientist who attempted to teach the feral youth basic communication, as well as basic morality. Truffaut never puts anything in front of his camera that isn’t essential to understanding the unique dynamic between student and teacher, making the brisk 85-minute picture a study in economy. For instance, the dialogue—largely comprising the scientist’s instructions to the boy and/or the scientist’s voice-over observations about the boy’s progress—is wonderfully sparse. On many occasions, Truffaut slides into laser-focused montage scenes set to exuberant Vivaldi music, and these scenes accentuate the challenges and joys of attempting something that outsiders might view as impossible—the socialization of a young human who, through circumstance, has become as much animal as man. (For quite some time, it appears the boy is deaf and mute, but therapy improves his hearing and, to a lesser degree, his speech.)

          Shooting in black-and-white accentuates the clinical nature of Truffaut’s filmmaking, making The Wild Child seem like some lost artifact from a long-gone time; cinematographer Nestor Almendros’ naturalistic lighting cements the documentary-style verisimilitude. Truffaut himself plays the role of the scientist, Dr. Itard, and he gives a clean performance bereft of preening or vanity. This allows the focus to remain, as it should, on the wild child himself, whom Itard names Victor. (Playing the role is Jean-Pierre Cargol.) A fragile compendium of bizarre behaviors and nervous tics, Victor comes across as a beast in a cage—the cage being the “normal” world. This iconography contrasts effectively with the freedom the boy demonstrates during the film’s opening sequence, the only time he’s shown in his (un)natural element prior to being captured. One could argue that The Wild Child is both too restrained and too self-explanatory, but the touching ending and the compassion running throughout the film compensate for the remove that’s ingrained within Truffaut’s observational camerawork. Others have told similar stories with more intensity, but few done so with such intelligence.

The Wild Child: GROOVY

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

          Offering a harrowing but sensitive look at an obscure historical figure, the acclaimed French film The Story of Adele H. is significant as the movie that brought actress Isabelle Adjani her first international notoriety. Although the picture is very much an auteurist statement by director/co-writer François Truffaut—the most consistently accessible filmmaker to emerge from the celebrated French New Wave movement of the ’60s—his gifts were known to world audiences by the time this film was released. Therefore, the discovery of the picture is Adjani’s fearless acting.

          Portraying a young woman who throws away social position and wealth in Europe in order to chase a caddish soldier across the Atlantic, Adjani incarnates disturbing qualities of delusion, mania, obsession, and self-destruction. During the course of the movie, we literally watch a soul depart a body as Adjani’s character succumbs to madness. The performance is all the more noteworthy given Adjani’s arresting beauty—since the easier path of appearing in decorative roles was surely available to her, it’s impressive the actress chose challenging work. And because The Story of Adele H. set a template for many later Adjani roles, it’s fascinating to see how good she already was at portraying instability in this, her first major screen role.

          The story begins in Halifax, Nova Scotia, circa 1863. A refined but skittish French beauty (Adjani) arrives on a boat from Europe, and then takes up occupancy at a boarding house. She gives each person she meets a different explanation of her identity, eventually settling into the alias of Miss Lewly. In fact, Adele is the daughter of Victor Hugo, the great French literary and political figure. We soon learn that Adele is in love with Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robins0n), a British military officer stationed in Halifax. They were involved briefly in Europe, an interlude Adele mistook for the beginning of a lifelong romance.

          A callous gambler who moves from one lover to the next without a backward glance, Pinson doesn’t return Adele’s continued affection, so he’s startled to find she crossed an ocean to be with him. Adele’s fixation on Pinson grows stronger each time he spurns her, so even as Adele builds a network of supportive friends in Halifax—and even as Victor Hugo writes heartbreaking letters begging for her return home—Adele disappears into her fantasy of predestined love. She spends hours in her dark room writing a “book” that is actually just the ramblings of a troubled mind, and she humiliates herself by claiming that she’s married to and pregnant by Pinson.

          Truffaut tells the story largely in blackout sketches—appropriately, like chapters in a gloomy novel—and he steadily tracks Adele’s transformation to a skeletal wastrel wandering the streets in rags. Some of Truffaut’s storytelling devices feel forced, like the trope of Adele reading her own writing out loud as she works, but in general Truffaut approaches the material unobtrusively, often letting the bottomless mysteries of Adjani’s face fill the screen for long, wordless moments. Furthermore, one could argue that the lack of development in supporting characters is a way of helping viewers see the world through Adele’s myopic vision.

          Ultimately, The Story of Adele H. is a cold-blooded exercise, more clinical study than emotional journey, but for those willing to embrace the piece on its own terms—literary, meticulous, psychological—it’s a potent inquiry into the fragility of the human heart.

The Story of Adele H.: RIGHT ON

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

          Steven Spielberg’s second career-defining megahit in a row, following 1975’s Jaws, is in some ways an even more extraordinary demonstration of his gifts than its predecessor, because for much of the film Spielberg has to create excitement around unseen phenomena. Utilizing an arsenal of camera tricks, sophisticated special effects, and pure storytelling wizardry, Spielberg manufactures a vivid sensation that something unprecedented is unfolding, which generates relentless tension as viewers wait for the payoff. And then, in the jaw-dropping finale, he unleashes an onslaught of visual spectacle so overpowering that it justifies all the intense foreshadowing. One of the few films for which Spielberg received sole screenwriting credit, Close Encounters grew out of the director’s fascination with the idea of extraterrestrial life, and more specifically the idea of what might happen upon first contact between humankind and beings from another world.

          Although this subject had already been explored in countless films and TV shows, Spielberg approached the concept with such reverence that Close Encounters remains the definitive movie of its type, even though it’s really just a feature-length prelude to an unknown adventure that happens after the closing credits. Abetted by a masterful production team, Spielberg shapes the story (to which writers including Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, and Paul Schrader made significant but uncredited contributions) to include meticulous detail extrapolated from reports of real-life UFO sightings, as well as a plausible illustration of how the world’s military and scientific communities might react in the event of “close encounter,” to say nothing of imaginative depictions of how aircraft flown by outer-space visitors might manifest.

          Tying the film together is the character of Roy Neary (Schrader’s invention, according to some reports), an everyman who becomes obsessed with finding the truth after his pickup truck has an astonishing run-in with an alien craft. Richard Dreyfuss plays Neary to wrenching effect, depicting how the character’s quest for facts is a desperate need to prove he hasn’t gone insane—and a search for personal identity greater than that of an anonymous working stiff. Melinda Dillon and Teri Garr, as the two women in his life, provide earnest counterpoint and sharp comic relief, respectively, while Bob Balaban and iconic French filmmaker Francois Truffaut stand out among the scientific types who cross Neary’s path. Close Encounters includes some of the most exciting scenes Spielberg ever filmed, like Dillon and Dreyfuss busting through a military barrier to reach the natural wonder of Devils Tower in Wyoming, and it also features some of the funniest, like Dreyfuss’ experiments with a mound of mashed potatoes. So while Close Encounters is not for every taste (some fret the ending doesn’t go far enough, others complain it goes way too far), it’s a remarkable experience for those who, like Neary, want to believe.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: OUTTA SIGHT