Love, Lies and Videotape

My Mirror column:
 
How Francois Truffaut, who'd have been 88 this February, created an on-screen alter ego from 1959 to 1979, weaving happily between life and fiction

Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel in Love on the Run (1979), the last of Francois Truffaut's Doinel films.

There's a quick moment in Francois Truffaut's Love on the Run (1979) where the film's hero Antoine Doinel (a middle-aged but still childish version of the alter ego character Truffaut introduced with his first feature The 400 Blows) tells his son Alphonse that he must practice the violin. “What will happen if I don't?” asks the long-haired little boy. “You'll end up as a music critic,” says Antoine, poker-faced.

The filmmaker who arguably founded the French New Wave isn't undignified enough to milk the line for laughs. We hear it, we move on. But we do so knowing that Truffaut has made one of his frequent joking references to his own life – and as often the case with Truffaut, we don't quite know who the joke is on. Because Francois Truffaut, who was born 88 years ago this month -- on February 6, 1932 -- began his career in cinema as a critic.

After a troubled childhood that landed him in a reformatory, much like Antoine Doinel, Truffaut had come to the notice of legendary film critic Andre Bazin. Over eight years in the pages of the journal Cahiers du Cinema, he grew into an influential voice, critiquing the commercial French cinema of the time. Truffaut wanted people to stop thinking of good cinema as derived from literature or tied too strongly to a script. He called for much greater freedom, new technology such as the handheld camera, and improvisation that allowed for the visual qualities of cinema to be foregrounded.

Oddly for someone trying to emphasise the cinematic over the literary, Truffaut's references remained bookish. His famous “auteur theory” is essentially the claim that the director is the “author” (French: 'auteur') of a film just as the writer is of a book, his sensibility expressed by means of “the camera-pen” (French: 'le camera-stylo'). His filmic alter ego Antoine makes a shrine to the great French writer Balzac in his room as an adolescent. In Love on the Run, the last of the Antoine films, he works as a proofreader, having published one novel and speaking of writing another.

In another Truffaut film, The Man Who Loved Women (1977), the hero Bertrand seeks inspiration for writing an erotic autobiography in other memoirs. “How do you write about yourself? How did others do it?” he asks, coming to the conclusion that there are no rules: for any author, “his writing is as personal to him as his fingerprints”. Love on the Run, made two years later, is also full of conversations about fiction and autobiography, often scorning what might be seen as Truffaut's own artistic project by way of criticising Antoine's. “I'm not smart,” says Antoine's wife Christine, “but I know this: writing to settle old scores isn't art.” Another long and funny sequence involves Antoine's childhood girlfriend Colette (the relationship depicted in the short Antoine and Colette) becoming curious about his literary avatar. Having spied him after many years just as he's divorcing Christine, Colette buys his first novel, and quickly sees that Antoine's 'fiction' is really the story of his life, rewritten to show himself in a better light. Confronted, Antoine agrees mournfully.

“You write well,” says Colette, “But you will never be a real writer until you write something that is pure fiction.” Antoine jumps up excitedly and tells her the plot of his planned second novel, or rather its wonderfully romantic beginning, in which a man picks up the pieces of a torn-up photograph from the floor of a phone booth and “falls madly in love” with the unknown woman whose face is in it. But even as Antoine -- the thin, nerdy-looking actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played him in all the five films (as well as acting in other films by Truffaut and Godard) – insists with a certain nervous energy that this is his imagination, what Truffaut puts on screen is Léaud as Antoine glueing together the image of Sabine, the woman we have already met in Love on the Run as his current girlfriend.

Depending on how you're feeling – in general about men, and in particular about male artists who cannibalise their own lives for art – it is possible to view the Antoine Doinel films as a charming piece of whimsy that entertained several viewers over several decades, or as an indulgent ride that no one except Truffaut should have been forced to go on, at least not after Antoine and Colette. Whichever side you pick, Love on the Run is a fascinating cinematic document: one of the world's most influential filmmakers dipping in and out of clips of his own previous films, to continue the fictional story of a character he created out of his own life, played by the same actor and many of the same co-actors as in clips. In one such clip, from The 400 Blows, we watch the 12-year-old Antoine buttonholed by a psychologist. “Your parents say you're a liar,” she says. The boy wriggles his shoulders, as if shrugging off the weight of that accusation. “Well, I lie sometimes,” he says. “Because if I told the truth, they wouldn't believe me. So I lie.”

Fiction always wins, at least in theory.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 February 2020.