Luke Perry: The man who loved Truffaut

That headline is, I admit, a slight exaggeration. But Luke Perry — who passed away Monday at the ridiculously young age of 52 — really did express high regard for Francois Truffaut while I interviewed him for Cowboys & Indians magazine a few years back. Which, of course, was enough to transform me from an admirer to an ardent fan.

We were talking about Goodnight for Justice: Queen of Hearts (2013), the third in a trilogy of Hallmark Channel western films in which he starred as John Goodnight, a straight-shooting circuit court judge who dispenses justice with eloquence, compassion and, when necessary, lethal firepower. (Fun facts: 2011’s Goodnight for Justice was directed by Jason Priestly, Perry’s co-star in the original Beverly Hills 90210 TV series — and was, at the time it aired, the highest-rated made-for-cable movie in the history of the Hallmark Channel.) The official plot synopsis: “Between dealing with difficult defendants and dealing cards at saloons, John crosses paths with a stagecoach under attack. Drawing his gun, he comes to the rescue of the only surviving passenger, a beautiful woman named Lucy Truffaut (Katharine Isabelle, pictured above with Perry), who John doesn’t realize is actually a convicted con artist on the run.”

But wait, there’s more. Lucy doesn’t realize – at first, anyway — that John’s an honest judge. The bad news: Lucy is being pursued by Cyril Knox (Ricky Schroder), a wealthy aristocrat who wants her jailed. The good news: Lucy manages to convince John to help her escape – and board a riverboat where passengers are encouraged to indulge in high-stakes gambling.

Naturally, I had to ask:

Your lead female character is named Lucy Truffaut – like Francois Truffaut, the great French filmmaker who famously claimed, “Women are magic.” Did you intend this as a kind of wink-wink tribute to him?

Perry: Absolutely. Here’s the thing. When I sat down to come up with this one, the one sort of request that the [Hallmark Movie Channel] had made was that – well, in the past, I hung a guy, and shot a couple of other guys, and beat up a guy pretty badly in the last one.

Hey, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

Perry: [Laughs] Well, being the judge and jury and sometimes the executioner, that’s all part of his job. But the Hallmark people said, “Luke, our audience would also like to see you do some romantic stuff.” And at first, I couldn’t figure out what would be romantic about this character so much. But then I thought, when it comes to meeting a beautiful woman —historically, we’ve seen it — that’s when we men make our worst choices. While we’re thinking of ways to woo a beautiful woman, they just get into our heads. And I just wanted to do a story about that. And Truffaut knew all about that.

By the way: Has anyone else who’s interviewed you for this film noticed the Truffaut hat-tip?

Perry: You’re the only one who’s caught it, you’re the only one who’s asked. And I so appreciate it.

            

(Note: Francois Truffaut also was 52 when he died in 1984. And also gone way too soon.)

Au revoir, Jeanne Moreau

As a tribute to the great Jeanne Moreau, who passed away Monday in Paris at age 89, I offer this profile I wrote on the occasion of her appearance at the 1989 French Film Festival.

Speak her name, Jeanne Moreau, and the film buffs in your circle will recall the movies, the moments, the magic that made her the thinking man’s sex symbol of ‘60s French cinema.

Those lips: full, sensuous, ripe with provocative challenge, curving into a smile that lets you know she sees through all your clever poses. Those eyes: bright, knowing, focusing into a piercing stare that swerves like a gun turret, finds you, grabs you and won't let you go.

She conveys a promise — and a threat. If you're man enough.

And if you're a woman, you can only marvel at how, in an era before feminism was cool, she was always very liberated.

In Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), Jeanne Moreau is a bored, provincial housewife who abandons her husband and child for her new lover.

In Roger Vadim’s modern-dress version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1960), she is a master of erotic gamesmanship, bemused by the blandishments of spurned lovers, absolutely certain of her hold on her equally sportive husband. (When he slips away, to fall in love with another woman, her fury is quick, and her sting is deep.)

In Francois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), she is a relentless avenging angel, systematically seducing and killing the men who accidentally murdered her husband on their wedding day.

And in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) — arguably her greatest, certainly her most famous film — she is Catherine, the enigmatic beauty who demands life and love on her own terms, who rebels against bourgeois convention, who ends a long-running ménage a trois by killing herself and her lover.

During the past four decades, Moreau has made more than 80 films, working with such esteemed directors as Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey. Now, at age 61, she remains very much in demand, for starring and supporting roles, on the French stage as well as in international screen.

Still, for cineastes of a certain age, she will always be associated, almost to the exclusion of her other credits, with her work for the bold French directors of the nouvelle vague (new wave), film critics who began to create their own cinema in the late 1950s.

It was only appropriate, therefore, that Moreau was honored last month with a lifetime achievement award at the first French Film Festival in Sarasota, Fla. “She, more than any of the others, was the single star of the nouvelle vague,” said critic Molly Haskell, the festival’s artistic director.

To celebrate Moreau's career, the festival presented a newly restored print of Jules and Jim. On the afternoon before the screening, however, Moreau conceded she was reluctant to attend: Truffaut, who died five years ago, was a close friend, and the movie remains one of her favorites. “I'm torn between seeing the film,” she said, “and being ashamed of crying, or being a coward, and not seeing it.”

Jeanne Moreau is not a coward. Even though the movie brought back bittersweet memories — and, indeed, even though her mother passed away a few days before the Florida festival — she attended the screening. And if she had tears to shed, she waited until she was away from the prying eyes of hundreds of admiring moviegoers. For the audience, and for interviewers, Moreau had only smiles.

She almost laughed out loud when reminded that, not so very long ago, she was dubbed “the new Bette Davis” by an awestruck film critic.

“To tell the truth,” Moreau said in her familiar, gravelly purr, “when I began, I was told that I was ‘a new Bette Davis,’ and that got on my nerves. I mean, really.

“But many years later, through a common friend in LA, I was told, ‘Well, Bette Davis would like to know you at last. After all these years, she heard that there’s a new Bette Davis, and it's getting on her nerves.’ So he arranged a lunch that we had, at the Brown Derby, the two of us, and I loved being with her. That was about 15 years ago. And after that, each time she came to Paris, or each time I was in New York or LA and she was free, we would meet. I admire her very, very much. And she's so American, and I'm so French — that was so funny.”

Moreau smiled when I told her of a close friend who has long identified with Catherine, her character in Jules and Jim. She inquired, mischievously: “But she never killed herself with a lover, eh?” Well, no, not really. Not yet, at least. “Well,” she replied. “That's a good thing.”

Actually, Moreau claimed, most people don’t remember the murder-suicide that ends Jules and Jim. “I think the main idea people have [about the film] is, how can a woman manage to be in love with two men? And very funnily, the idea of the last tragedy, the death, is erased in the memory of people. They don’t talk about the suicide, and this crime — that's gone off. And what’s left is that a woman tried to make it with two men.

“Students who have seen the film, young girls and young boys, are interested in that very special relationship.

“But, you know, women of my age, or younger, never approach me concerning Jules and Jim. When they write to me, or when they speak to me, it’s more in relation to life in general. How do you manage? How did you make it? How is it that you're still there? How is it that you're working and you seem to enjoy it?”

The daughter of a French restaurant manager and his Anglo-Irish wife, Moreau was 15 years old when she saw her first play, Jean Anouilh's Antigone, and immediately informed her parents that she wanted to become an actress. There was something of a theatrical tradition in the family — her mother once danced at the Folies-Bergere. Even so, her father reacted badly to Moreau’s announcement: He slapped her soundly.

Undeterred, Moreau began taking courses at the Conservatoire theater school in Paris. By 20, she was the youngest performing member of the Comedie-Francaise. A few years later, she electrified Parisian theatergoers with her scorching portrayal of Maggie in the first French staging of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Movies, inevitably, followed.

In addition to her work with the nouvelle vague crowd, Moreau has starred in several English-language movies — The Victors, The Yellow Rolls-Royce, Monte Walsh, The Great Catherine — and directed two French film dramas, La Lumiere and The Adolescent. She is extremely proud of working in three different films directed by Orson Welles: The Trial, based on the Franz Kafka novel; Falstaff, a drama drawn from Shakespeare’s plays; and a never-completed version of a novel recently filmed, in Australia, as a thriller titled Dead Calm. “Freedom and tyranny,” she said. “Orson could be very good at both.”

During the past decade, Moreau has been more active on French stage, earning rave reviews as a maid looking back at her eventful life in Le Recit de la Servante, and, more recently, as an elderly and overweight matchmaker in a revival of a 15th-century Spanish play, La Celestine. (Next year, she may direct the French stage translation of Steel Magnolias.) After surviving a brief, stormy marriage to American filmmaker William Friedkin (The French Connection), Moreau lives alone in a Paris apartment, where she reads scripts, entertains offers, and looks forward, never backward, to her life and her work.

The movies continue to attract her interest. After Sarasota, she was off to Moscow to star in Anna Karamazoff, directed by political dissident Rustam Khamdamov. “He’s a young man who had been in hiding. Because of the new politics of Gorbachev, he has been allowed to make his film… And they asked me to do the main part, even though I’m French. Because this man, in hiding, has been dreaming about me. About pictures of me in magazines. And he saw some films. And he’s been dreaming about me doing his film. Isn’t that funny?”

When Anna Karamazoff wraps, Moreau will return to France for La Femme Fardee, based on the novel by Francoise Sagan. Next year, she will travel to Australia for a major role in Until the End of the World, a futuristic love story directed by Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas).

So, tell us, Jeanne Moreau: How is it that you’re still working and you seem to enjoy it?

“Maybe because I didn't think of my life in terms of career. Very early, when I became successful with the New Wave, I’d been making films for 10 years. And I felt the danger, instinctively. I didn’t want to be part of the star system, you know, where they say, ‘Oh, you represent so much, and that means you should get such-and-such amount of money.’ That frightened me, really.

“So I moved away. I said no to lots of things. And I lived very freely. I traveled, I fell in love, I did nothing, I read — surrounded by people who were saying, ‘Oh, you’re destroying your career.’ But I didn’t want any career.

“And now, that's my strength. Because I do not belong to any category. I’m out. So that’s total freedom. And because of that, I don't worry. And not worrying, I’ve kept a very childish attitude toward being an actress: I enjoy it, immensely. And I have a great curiosity. And as soon as something crazy comes my way, like that Soviet director who says, ‘I can't pay you, you have to buy your plane ticket, and you have to come over, the only thing I’m sure of is that you’re going to have food and a good bed’ — well, I go. You see?

“I have learned to look at my life, and see it’s incredible how unexpected things come up. I’m really a lucky person.”

Paying respects to Francois Truffaut

Once again, I have uncovered lost treasures through the simple task of housecleaning. In 1990, while on my way to the Cannes Film Festival, I stopped off in Paris to interview Diane Kurys. And she very graciously directed me to the Montmartre Cemetery, where I could pay respects to Francois Truffaut. Someday, I keep telling myself, I want to go back.
  

Francois Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu & Richard Roud at 1980 New York Film Festival

While trying to bring order out of chaos in my ridiculously cluttered home office this afternoon, I happened upon a shoebox filled with old photos. And lo and behold: I found these pictures I took at the 1980 New York Film Festival press conference for The Last Metro. Then, as now, my skills as a shutterbug leave something to be desired. Still, these shots of François Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu and festival director Richard Roud bring back very happy memories.

(BTW: I am forever indebted to Philip Wuntch, my former colleague at the Dallas Morning News. Back in the day, Philip was the lead film critic and I was a lowly arts & entertainment staff writer. But he was impossibly decent to me, and signed off on my having some pretty sweet film-related assignments. Like... well, like covering the New York Film Festival.)

Spike Lee: Essential cinema

Spike Lee includes two Francois Truffaut classics -- The 400 Blows and Day for Night -- and several other worthy choices, including Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest, on his list of must-see movies. I would add Do the Right Thing to his list, because he's much too modest to do so himself.

Truffaut Lives!

I've had this poster mounted in a place of honor -- directly above the writing desk in my home office -- for years and years. Today, while experimenting with the camera on my new cellphone, I snapped this shot -- and, as you can see, the flash appears precisely where it should, even though I didn't intend it to. Indeed, I seriously doubt that I could replicate this effect if I tried. Maybe Truffaut is trying to tell me something?

Free on Hulu: Two in the Wave

In 1959, critic-turned-filmmaker Francois Truffaut – whose incendiary reviews of the Cannes Film Festival had gotten him banned from that fest just one year earlier -- made his first big splash as an auteur at Cannes with his debut feature, The 400 Blows, his profoundly affecting and enduringly influential autobiographical drama.

One year later, Jean-Luc Godard – another outspoken firebrand who railed against the prevailing norms of cinéma de papa in the pages of the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema – plunged into feature filmmaking with Breathless, his stylistically audacious and exuberantly fatalistic neo-noir romantic melodrama.

Together, these two friends – destined, perhaps inevitably, to become competitive rivals, then bitter enemies – helped launch La Nouvelle Vague or, if you don’t parlez-vous français, the French New Wave, a loose-knit, deeply committed group of highly individualistic film directors who burst upon the international scene in general and the U.S. art-house circuit in particular during the heady days of the post-Eisenhower Era.

There were other notables in their ranks – including Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda – but it was Truffaut and Godard who, then and now, defined in the minds of most critics, academics and cinephiles the revolutionary vitality of a filmmaking movement influenced in equal measures by Italian Neorealism, Hollywood Classicism and anything-goes youthful audacity. So it is altogether fitting that director Emmanuel Laurent has chosen to focus almost exclusively on the early careers of those two artists in Two in the Wave.

Written and narrated by film critic Antoine de Baecque, who has authored authoritative biographies of both men, this celebratory documentary is an ingeniously conceived and executed collage culled from newspaper and magazine clippings, newsreels and TV interviews and, of course, generous swaths of film clips. You can read more of what I had to say about it durng its 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston debut here. And you see if for yourself up there. Or right here.

Obama vs. E.T.?

I've always suspected that Steven Spielberg cast Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a scientist who could communicate with extraterrestrials because... well, because of course Truffaut could have communicated with extraterrestrials, if he'd ever had to, because that's the kind of amazingly astute and sensitive fellow he was. In much the same vein, I'm not at all surprised to hear that most people believe Barack Obama would be better qualified than Mitt Romney to handle an invasion by unfriendly extraterrestrials. After all: The dude took care of Osama Bin Laden, right? 

On the other hand, I'm not sure even President Obama could do a better job of leading the human counteroffensive than... President Bill Pullman.

Talking Truffaut (and Darling Companion) with Kevin Kline

Here is my favorite Kevin Kline story: We’re riding the elevator down to the lobby of a swanky L.A. hotel at the end of a long day of interviews during the 1991 press gathering for Grand Canyon. And he’s politely listening to my whining about a decision I have to make soon – very soon, like within an hour or so.

As a film critic for The Houston Post, I really, really should go out that evening to see a nationally advertised advance screening of The Last Boy Scout, because I’ve already missed the press screening of that Bruce Willis flick back home in H-Town.

But gee whiz, a rep-house theater within an easy drive from the hotel is showing newly restored prints of two Francois Truffaut movies – Mississippi Mermaid and The Bride Wore Black – on a double bill. I’m flying home tomorrow morning, so tonight will be my only chance to see them. But Bruce Willis is a big star, and Last Boy Scout may be a big film. But I’m a big Truffaut fan – hell, I’m still mourning his 1984 death – and these two particular films aren’t in wide rep-house circulation. But I do kinda-sorta have a duty to my readers. But I…

Gently but firmly, Kline interrupts my blather. He looks me squarely in the eye, smiles just a bit, and says: “You’ve already made your decision, haven’t you?” His tone signifies he is not making a query, but stating a fact. And, of course, he is absolutely correct.

Flash forward 21 years, and wouldn’t you know it: Even as Kline and I are settling down for a chat about his latest movie – the wise and witty Darling Companion, in which he co-stars with the lovely and talented Diane Keaton (above) – we’re still talking about Truffaut. And other things as well. You can read the rest of my CultureMap.com Q&A here.

Update: And you can rent a DVD of the movie starting Aug. 28 through Redbox.

Birthday greetings to Francois Truffaut... and Ronald Reagan

To celebrate the birthday of Francois Truffaut -- who would have turned 80 today -- I invite you to look at this gallery of posters from his early films. And if you're marking the 101st anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, here is my respectful appreciation (no kidding) of the late President's acting career.

Francois Truffaut disses Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman trashes Orson Welles, Tim Burton flips off Kevin Smith -- and everybody piles on Jean-Luc Godard

At a dinner party I attended several years ago, it was my great misfortune to be seated near a woman who wanted to know -- no, make that demanded to know -- what was so freakin' great about Citizen Kane. I politely attempted to explain why the movie was such an artistic breakthrough, how it continues to influence other movies and moviemakers, what technical and storytelling elements are so thrillingly impressive... and she didn't buy any of it. It all boiled down to this: She thought that it was a pretentious bore, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a pompous twit. Finally, I had to tell her -- again, politely -- that she had every right to her opinion, and we'd have to agree to disagree.

(It's an occupational hazard for film critics: Random encounters with folks who seem irrationally enraged by the possibility that they don't "get" something that other people do. As I have told several such aggressively opinionated people: "Look, I can't argue you into liking something you obviously don't.")

I was reminded of this unpleasant encounter while reading "The 30 Harshest Filmmaker-on-Filmmaker Insults In History," Jason Bailey's funny and fascinating piece for Flavorwire.com. Bailey catalogs some of the nastiest critiques, putdowns and bitchslaps ever aimed by one auteur at another. And No. 3 on his list is a scathing dismissal of Orson Wells in general and Citizen Kane in particular, offered by no less a luminary than -- are you ready for this? are you sitting down? -- Ingmar Bergman:

“For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”

Ouch. Maybe I should have asked the lady at the dinner party if she liked The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.

Elsewhere in the Flavorwire piece, Bailey quotes Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni (described by Truffaut as “the only important director I have nothing good to say about"), Tyler Perry on Spike Lee ("Spike can go straight to hell!"), and Tim Burton on Kevin Smith (who, you will not be at all surprised to discover, responds in kind). And while I should be shamed to admit this -- indeed, it might even get my film reviewing license revoked -- I laughed out loud while noting that Bergman and Welles did agree on at least one thing: The films of Jean-Luc Godard are far short of unalloyed delights.

How many of these barbs were inspired by professional jealousy or private agendas? Who knows? After all, not every filmmaker is as honest as Norman Jewison, who once told me he “didn’t necessarily want to like” The 400 Blows when Francois Truffaut unveiled his first feature in 1959, “because I knew he had been a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, and there were a lot of things that I disagreed with him on. And when he said he was going to make a film, I said, ‘Here you are, you asshole. Now you’ll find out that it’s not so goddamn easy.’"

But then Jewison got a look at Truffaut's handiwork. "And he was brilliant," Jewison said, expressing equal measures of amusement and appreciation. "Totally brilliant.”

Hulu Flashback: The existential cool of Bob le Flambeur

Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) walks like a slumming prince through the shadowland of pre-dawn Paris. His hat tilted at a jaunty angle, a cigarette dangling from his frowning lips, he's a trenchcoated knight errant, master of all he surveys.

Still ruggedly handsome in his autumnal years, he has the imperturbable bearing of someone who has seen it all, done it all, and cared for little of it. Even so, there's still some spark in the old boy. As he notes the sidewalk flirtations of a teen-age temptress, you can see a flash of disapproval in his near-impassive eyes. But if you look closely enough, you'll also see a flicker of bemused appreciation.

Quite an entrance, eh? And quite a larger-than-life creation, this Bob Montagne, the hardboiled but honorable hero of Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler), the classic 1956 melodrama directed and co-written by the late, great Jean-Pierre Melville.

A forerunner of the auteurs who launched the French New Wave in the late '50s and early '60s, Melville eschewed studio sets and lavish production values, preferring to work on real locations -- on real streets, in real apartments and alleyways -- with small camera crews. He used many of the same semi-guerrilla techniques later adopted by such New Wavers as Francois Truffaut (who cast Decomble, the grizzled cop of Bob le Flambeur, as a strict schoolteacher in The 400 Blows) and Jean-Luc Godard. In 1959, Godard acknowledged the debt by casting Melville as a visiting celebrity in Breathless, and peppered that movie's dialogue with references to a certain Bob Montagne.

Much like many of the younger New Wavers, Melville paid affectionate tribute to American film-noir thrillers of the '40s and early '50s. The big difference is, Melville's tributes came first.

Bob Montagne obviously is blood kin to the noble tough guys once essayed by Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. But Bob le Flambeur is not a slavish imitation, or an overly reverential homage. The movie can be enjoyed on its own terms, for its own merits, as a street-smart comedy of manners, and as a slyly stylized evocation of underworld life in post-World War II Paris. Call it pulp fiction elevated to high art by a romantic sensibility, and you won't be far off the mark.

You can read my full review of Bob le Flambeur -- written in 2001, on the occasion of the film's theatrical re-release -- here. And you can read my review of The Good Thief, Neil Joran's exceptionally entertaining 2003 remake starring Nick Nolte -- here.

Truffaut and Godard: Together again!

This weekend only at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Read all about it here.

Remembering Truffaut

To mark the 50th anniversary of Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows -- and the 25th anniversary of the great director's death -- the editors of MovieMaker Magazine asked me to write a tribute to The Man Who Loved Movies. But here's the catch: You can't read it on the Internet. You'll actually have to buy a copy of the magazine -- what a concept! -- and read it the old-fashioned way.

Here a film festival, there a film festival

I have nothing but best wishes and hearty encouragement for the folks organizing the inaugural Cinema Arts Festival Houston, which got some nice coverage today in the Houston Chronicle. But talk about bad timing: The H-Town event takes place directly opposite the Starz Denver Film Festival -- where I'll be doing an on-stage Q&A with (and presenting an Excellence in Acting award to) Hal Holbrook, and presenting a 50th anniversary screening of Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Look for some postings from the Mile High City next week.

Truffaut's daughter remembers The Wild Child

From the Calgary Herald: Laura Truffaut recalls her weeks as a 10-year-old visitor to the set of her dad's classic film. The Wild Child, writer Nancy Tousley explains, is the story of Victor, "the Wild Child of Aveyron, who is sighted in the forest [in 1798] by a woman gathering mushrooms. Hunters chase the naked child who lopes along on all fours and climbs high up in the trees. Using dogs, they capture and overpower him. Dr. Jean Itard, a physician, takes the child in to socialize him and see if he can teach him to speak."

Money quote from Laura Truffaut: "For my father, the film really was about neglect and care, not about love. I think he really felt that to be human is to be cared for or to care for others. He didn’t want to romanticize the character of the doctor. The movie was made at the time of the hippie movement, at the time of a much more romantic view of a return to nature, and my father was a little bit at odds with that... For him, when the child is alone in the forest, it was a state of neglect. It was not the way a child should be having to live. It was dangerous. He was abandoned. No matter how repetitive the doctor’s exercises were (for the child to do), they are a demonstration of care.”

Oscarcast: First impressions

Hugh Jackman as host? Excellent. How excellent? Ask him back for next year, please. Hey, anyone who can give a shoutout to Francois Truffaut is a keeper, OK?

Past Actor/Actress nominees praising and presenting current nominees? Smart innovation, effectively executed, worth keeping as a new tradition.

Overall? Best Oscarcast in years. Seriously.

Oscar winners? No real complaints. I would have loved to see Frank Langella grab the Best Actor prize -- but Sean Penn is a worthy choice. Kate Winslet earned her gold. Other winners? Again, no real complaints.

Is The Wild Child a refutation of theism?

Glenn Kenny makes a provocative case for Francois Truffaut's masterwork as a "potent parable for non-believers."

Truffaut lives!

As a neglected child growing up in Paris of the 1940s, François Truffaut took joy where he could find it. He found it more often than not within the darkness of movie theaters, often playing hooky and sneaking in side doors to see favorite films again and again.

Time went by and he would sit ever closer to the screen, as though wishing to literally lose himself inside the images that promised a better, more stable world. Outside, he was at best an indifferent student, usually ignored by his self-absorbed parents and often brutalized by unsympathetic teachers. But once inside a theater like the Gaumont-Palace, beguiled by larger-than-life fantasies and excited by the danger of discovery, Truffaut blossomed like some exotic night-blooming orchid. Here, in the magical kingdom of lights and shadows, he was a prince of the realm.

"For me," Truffaut would say three decades later, "cinema is not a sad imitation of life. It is an improvement on life."

Little wonder, then, that after years of immersing himself in his favorite art form, of discovering cinema with all the attendant ecstasy and guilt one normally associates with sexual awakening, Truffaut chose film as his life work.

He began as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, the celebrated French film magazine, where he proselytized for a "cinema of the first-person singular," encouraging the creation of movies "even more personal than an autobiographical novel, more like a confession or an intimate diary."
When he was ready to make the transition from critic to creator as a founder of the maverick nouvelle vague ("new wave") movement, he took his own words to heart. And while he was at it, he made a timeless masterpiece.

The 400 Blows, Truffaut's profoundly affecting and enduringly influential first feature, is on view in revival screenings this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It's a frankly autobiographical drama, at once brutally specific and brilliantly emblematical, about Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a 14-year-old boy whose acute sensitivity makes him tragically vulnerable to the hard knocks of an emotionally deprived childhood. Don't look for anything so comforting as rosy-hued nostalgia here. "Adolescence," Truffaut pointedly noted in a 1959 essay, "leaves pleasant memories only for adults who can't remember." Truffaut, who was 26 when he filmed 400 Blows, couldn't forget. Read more here.

Adventures at SXSW

After extending my stay to cover a few more films -- here are my reviews of Crawford and Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- I found myself low on funds here in Austin. So I took a one-night temp job as bouncer in a biker bar. Fortunately, I was able to flash my new tattoo to get myself some badass cred. A couple of drunken rowdies tried to start a fight by saying Jean-Luc Godard was the only true genius of the French New Wave. But they shut up pretty damn fast when I got medieval on them with a pool cue. Deconstruct that, suckas!