Three Tears for Truffaut!

An encyclopedic tour through Francois Truffaut's life and filmmaking career, Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana's Truffaut: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 462) is a sprawling work that, oddly, seems content to crawl. Though occasionally revved by direct quotes from the subject and the actresses (read girlfriends) with whom he worked and played, the book wavers between straight-faced homage and a guide to financing French films in the 1950s, a less than riveting (or relevant) duality. What it lacks in focus and spirit, it compensates for in a sheer abundance of information, a regrettable exchange. But the authors manage to paint a sufficient -- if not absorbing -- portrait of an insecure, childlike dreamer whose films evidence both a sophisticated love affair with cinema and a peculiar emotional naivete.

Truffaut wrenched several careers and many more passions from his purist love of film. He made the defiant leap from unsympathetic critic to vulnerable artist, thus refuting the oft-chorused bleat: those who can't do, criticize.

A bastard child bounced from one reluctant relative to another, Francois was a victim of forgotten invitations to family vacations and barely acknowledged birthdays. His own adolescent misfortunes and rascality pump through the veins of The Wild Child and Small Change, films that relate his concerns about the troubled state of child welfare.

De Baecque and Toubiana assert that systematic childhood neglect underlined Truffaut's fascination with film. Indeed, he coated himself with this brand of illusion as an armor against his disillusionment with the outside world. The inordinate number of feature films to his credit -- 22 -- indicate that celluloid was his preferred sanctuary.

When depression set in he would run to his collaborators to initiate a new project, thus finding solace, breath. Later in his career, he literally immersed himself in his films, acting in them and portraying characters that mirrored both his profession (Day for Night) and his conscience (The Green Room).

The book enlivens when Truffaut's voice is invited to burst through the authors' verbiage via direct quotes and personal correspondence. But as those injections are too sparse, what saves the reader from drowning in this chaptered sea of facts and details is one of the book's undeclared theses: Truffaut was a man of striking contradictions and not the occasional hypocrite.

Though shy to a fault, the director was a womanizer. He bit his nails in company not only as a technique to avoid participating in idle chit chat, but as a method of attracting women (they would playfully chastise him for the habit). As a pioneer of the New Wave movement, he championed a breed of cinema that celebrated improvisation, but refused to leave anything to chance on his set. Early in his career Truffaut befriended fellow film critic and vocal anti-Semite Lucien Rebatet (who campaigned in his writings for the French motion picture industry to be cleansed of its Jews), only to discover years later that he was a Jew himself.

Though fascinated with politics, Truffaut refused to commit himself or his films to political parties or causes and lambasted filmmakers who did (though he made personal exception by including a book-burning scene in Fahrenheit 451, a testament to his intense opposition to censorship). He fiercely flipped from the ideological left to the conservative right, but when stirred by the French McCarthyism of de Gaulle, he promptly flopped back to the left. He participated in a get-out-the-vote campaign in the election of 1981, but did not himself cast a vote.

Then there were the ladies ... Truffaut's female leads were his perfect creations and his desire for them was pathological. He cheated ad nauseam on his wife Madeline Morgenstern (rumored by critics to be a marriage of convenience because Truffaut sought the patronage of her father, a well-known distributor who financed Truffaut's first feature The 400 Blows after their marriage). Indeed, accepting a female lead in a Truffaut film was virtually a silent accord to become the director's lover, at least for the duration of the shoot. The most significant of Truffaut's few relationships to survive a wrap party was with Catherine Deneuve. Sensing Truffaut's oncoming and epidemic romantic malaise, she let him, leaving him confused and clinically depressed.

But the juiciest bits of the book are hardly Truffaut's romances, real or reel-rime. For a heavy dose of dramatic flair, flip to the post-New Wave letters that document the cat fight between Truffaut and once-cohort Jean-Luc Godard. The relationship between the two soured virtually overnight, indeed the night Godard saw Day for Night. A disgusted Godard raced home and wrote a punishing letter to his one-time ally, militantly denouncing his popular success and branding him a sell-out who catered his films to the public's taste (which, if true, would be very un-New Wave of him). Confident that accessibility need not be the enemy of creativity, Truffaut countered that popular success was a by-product and by no means damning proof that he had stopped making the films he wanted to make. Professional criticism quickly descended into personal attack and the words "little shit" would crown every correspondence Truffaut sent to his biggest critic from 1973 onwards.

Ultimately, the book is successful in proving Truffaut's pecking order: he loved his movies and his women -- always in that order. Like sleep for the sick, his films were fitful but short-lived escapes from persistent emotional plagues. But coldly running through these wonderful films as if they were mere Roman numerals, the authors build their thesis with the artistry of a term paper but, in the process, forget to tell a story. Spurts of new information and some amusing anecdotes manage to float to the surface, but the book is weighed down by obsessive detail and not-so-occasional sappiness. This makes for a comprehensive biography anointed with flair, but by no means stewing in it.