Today marks a very special day at The Memory Tourist. Not only was yesterday the eighth month anniversary, but this is officially the 400th post that I’ve written. As a project that I designed to cure the doldrums of pandemic ennui, it has brought plenty of catharses and allowed me to feel more hopeful about the world. I am thankful for the opportunities that this website has afforded me and I can only hope that there are better days ahead.
But for the 400th article, which would’ve been the latest Best Movie I Saw This Week column, I decided to divert from the regular for just one week. Besides the fact that it would’ve been Two English Girls (1971), the idea of focusing on Francois Truffaut had always been appealing. I consider him to be one of the great sentimentalists of cinema and as someone with an unabashed love for French New Wave titles, it felt like a good time to celebrate the filmmaker who has come to embody the best in film nerdery. Sure you can argue that some have been more accessible, but to watch Truffaut age is to see someone mature with their relationship to cinema and love, and it’s a shame that he never got to grow old.
Nowhere is that more apparent than with his film series titled The Adventures of Antoine Doinel. As a writer, I have this affection for characters that creators keep returning to at various points throughout their career. I think the most apparent contemporary version would be The Before Trilogy from Richard Linklater, finding us visiting these characters for 24 hours to see how they’ve grown. Much like how Linklater wants to explore the idea of love over years and decades, Truffaut clearly wanted to explore his personal connection to art as a form of escapism. While some could argue that most of his films do it, I think there’s something to be said about Antoine Doinel.
As I’ve mentioned before on here, I’m generally impressed with the chemistry that actor Jean-Pierre Leaud brings to every role. You see him in Irma Vep (1996) and it feels like an extension of Doinel, finding a man suffering deep internal angst as his life fails to be fully realized. The fact that he’s a filmmaker seems like a charming tip-off to his collaborations with Truffaut. He had this handsome charm, a charisma that made him one of French New Wave’s most recognizable actors. What’s more of a miracle is that he sustained it for 20 years while building the life of Doinel.
Which is the fun thing. Much like The Before Trilogy (and a hypothetical fourth entry), there’s no promise that the series will ever return. It feels like a whim that Truffaut continually had these stray ideas that he wanted to express, and this was his outlet. When you watch Doinel, you’re seeing some projection of the author, given this tender naivety that allows for a mix of escapism and understanding as the titles range from coming of age dramas to noir comedies and domestic affairs. It can be argued that of every film series, Doinel’s may be the most fulfilling in how perfectly it serves as self-expression.
Sure, Truffaut would continue to do brilliant dramas throughout his career. He grew in ways that are astounding, finding a tender heart towards the craft. I think of the romance in Jules and Jim (1962), showing a growth of youthful exploits towards a deeper meaning. As individual projects, they’re magnificent. Still, there’s something just as compelling about Truffaut’s handling of Doinel during all of this. He starts his journey as a wayward child and ends 20 years later with some sense of fulfillment. We’ve watched him grow, finding ourselves in those steps along the way. While I would argue that a lot of his filmography may be more successful, there’s something to asking: what is this saying about Truffaut?
It helps that the whole series begins with The 400 Blows (1959), which I’m sure most fans of world cinema will know very well. Everyone who’s anyone knows the impact that this film had. It became the highest-grossing title in France and has continually ranked among the very best coming of age movies. It also has an excellent Jean Constantin soundtrack that has been continually referenced, most notably in Frances Ha (2013), adding this eclectic undertone to the story of a boy who skids through life, barely avoiding trouble at all costs. If you don’t know the movie, it’s likely that you know the final shot, watching Doinel on the beach trying to find somewhere to run to.
While Truffaut had done a few short films and penned the screenplay for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), this was his big debut, a grand statement that established him as a filmmaker. In his personal life, he was a writer for Cahiers du Cinema, adoring the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and having this love of film that shone through his work. The French New Wave Movement was largely fueled by creators like this, adoring imports of American culture, paying homage to these titles with posters and, in the case of Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) even getting Gene Kelly and George Chakiris to do a few dance numbers as a sly reference.
The Movement was in part a celebration of film, but whereas the American counterpart has largely been distracted by the homage, directors like Truffaut used the references as a backdrop to some greater point. Their art was organic to their own experiences, drawing from French culture, and having philosophical conversations that were complex. Sex was no big deal. Making outward political statements was almost required. The passion for film existed more as a footnote to whatever Truffaut was really talking about.
The 400 Blows is where everything starts, finding a sense of displacement in society and at home. It’s the need to feel like one belongs. There’s no denying that some of that love comes from escaping to a cinema, but at the end of the day, it was a need to feel like you’re loved. It’s why it seemed like a fluke that Doinel would make his brief return with Antoine and Colette (1962); a short that he made for the series Love at Twenty (1962) featuring him now pressing LPs and watching orchestral concerts.
Of every entry, it’s the most slight in large part because Colette is a one-off character, serving as this study of how Doinel would fall in love, experiencing love for the first time. It’s vivid, capturing his essence, and finding something intriguing about home life. Truffaut does an excellent job of bringing Colette to life, serving as this idealized girlfriend who nourishes his creativity. It becomes heartbreaking to realize that for as much as you want Doinel to find some acceptance, it’s all for naught. This love of music and culture paves the way for something that seems too good to be true. In fact, it is, revealing that Doinel has much to learn.
Given that The 400 Blows has been considered autobiographical, it’s easy to see everything that follows to hold some truth about his views on life. It shines through in his sentimentalism here, though it becomes more interesting with the next two titles, Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970), where the series begins to take its full shape and become something more substantial. Before this, Antoine and Colette could just be considered a minor work, not unlike his other shorts like The Kids (1957). It was just coincidental that Doinel was involved.
But with Stolen Kisses, I think that the series began its journey into something more timeless. By this point, Truffaut was running the table of playing with the genre with films like Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim, finding his attention moving towards the romantic lives of his characters. He was attracted to the doomed nature of their souls, needing to understand what made us fall in love in the first place.
Stolen Kisses is easily the most creative of the series. While it continues the idea of him being a misfit, such as being discharged from the military, it’s the exuberance of youth that drives the story. He buys into the idea of love as a mystery, trying to court his love interest for the rest of the series: Christine Darbon (Claude Jade). Considering his love of Hitchcock, it makes sense that he taps into the mystery and curiosity with the playful humor, finding that moment where it feels like everything will work out for Doinel, that his time with Christine will be the saving grace his life has needed.
The story continues with Bed and Board, which finds marriage not working out. Once again, there is a fear of rejection on Truffaut’s part. Now that he’s an adult and has responsibilities, Truffaut has become compelled by the more mature side. It’s a perfect mirror of Stolen Kisses’ playfulness as Bed and Board dives into themes of divorce and sacrifice wondering if there could ever be something like a true love. It’s much more complex than that, but given that his later dramas such as The Soft Skin (1964) and Two English Girls sided more towards finding life struggles within the genre, it makes sense that Doinel was once again serving as a cipher for his insecurities growing older.
The odd duck of the series is Love on the Run (1979), which both closes the series on a satisfying note while also being the most underwhelming. Whereas the motion of every previous entry is forward, it is the one that is infatuated with the past. Like all great sentimentalists, Truffaut reaches a point where nostalgia becomes just as beautiful, and he’s obsessed with asking the question of what Doinel’s ultimate life lessons have been. Now that he’s over 30, what has he been able to pull from his experiences? There’s more archival footage and callbacks this time around. Christine and Colette both make cameos, and there’s an overall discussion of how adulthood is going.
In some respects, it’s the anticlimactic finale that more reinforces what the audience knows than reveals something new. Still, for a story that began with The 400 Blows and questioning one’s place in the world, to have a story conclude with happiness and success is maybe the ending that Doinel deserved all along. Truffaut loves him too much to end with Bed and Board and some sad divorce. He needs to believe that Doinel will be okay because, in a cinematic form, it’s Truffaut’s way of realizing that he achieved his dreams.
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| Francois Truffaut |
There is something admirable about Truffaut’s legacy. He is a movie critic who found a way to express his opinion through vivid filmmaking. I think his entire body of work is checking out, though even more, it’s worth assessing. With Doinel, it became the mirror into his life that now resonates through time. You see it in Linklater films or any auteur who wishes to recognize themselves in film. Whereas every other film was Truffaut making a comment on the film, Doinel was his comment on himself in that world, an acclaimed filmmaker who received Oscar nominations, had box office success, and left behind an enviable legacy.
With my 400th piece, I take it to look at Truffaut because he set a template for how filmmakers should engage with cinema. While I can’t argue that he’s my personal favorite, there is something safe and secure about watching one of his films, feeling like he was in tune with his emotions as much as his love of art. What he conveyed wasn’t escapism, but the reality of how we use art as self-expression. It may be why I think his work has aged much better than the more experimental style of Godard and ranks alongside Agnes Varda as the most exuberant and exciting director to watch. I wonder what his life would’ve been like had he lived. There’s a part of me that feels like he would’ve made his Irma Vep eventually. If nothing else, I’m sure we’d have a more definitive continuation of the Doinel story, which would be quite something.
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