Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits

An engrossing 93-minute documentary on filmmaker Francois Truffaut, one of France's most popular contributions to the world of film thus far, Toubiana (quasi-editor of Les Cahiers du Cinema) and Pascal seek to get a handle on the man behind the myth via a series of interviews with Truffaut's friends and contemporaries. Among them are Claude Chabrol, who brings to mind his own “nouvelle vague” style of late-Sixties filmmaking as much as anything, and Eric Rohmer, who confesses, while idly wading through a pile of old scripts and notebooks, that Truffaut was as much an enigma then as he appears to be now. Coming from a harsh, impoverished background and family life (much like Antoine Doinel, the young protagonist played by Jean-Pierre Leaud in the filmmaker's first success, The 400 Blows), Truffaut used the cinema -- and the process of making movies -- to create an identity for himself, simultaneously writing film criticism for Les Cahiers du Cinema, cobbling together resources for his short film Les Mistons, and wooing the producer's daughter. The semi-autobiographical character of Antoine Doinel also reappears in many of the director's subsequent films, maturing and aging along with his creator. Gerard Depardieu comes closest to the filmmakers' intentions of discovering the secret world of the director with a series of reminiscences that reveal the almost father/son camaraderie the two enjoyed together. Ever-faithful in his obsessions, Truffaut literally kept reams of files on his contemporaries for use in his articles and, one presumes, to keep tabs on what everyone else was doing at the time. Although Truffaut died in 1984, the files have apparently yet to be catalogued in any systematic manner -- we hear Truffaut's wife, Madeleine Morgenstern relate how reticent she's been about opening them now that her husband is gone, leaving the job to the occasional film scholar who shows up requesting material. Toubiana and Pascal have dug deep into the core of Truffaut's life, illuminating the more prominent aspects of the auteur's style while unearthing even more questions about the man himself than we had when starting out. (Truffaut's decision to appear in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is never really explained.) Nevertheless, it's probably as close to knowing what went on in the master's head as anyone can get ten years after his death.