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.

Learning of love

My Mirror column:

From Francois Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, what propels so many writers and filmmakers to turn the child’s gaze upon adults in the throes of desire?

“Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful,” begins the voiceover of François Truffaut’s Les Mistons (The Brats), as Bernadette Lafont cycles through the historic streets of De Nimes – her slim, leggy frame suspended effortlessly over her bicycle, her skirt billowing in the breeze, such a vision of lightness that she seems barely to touch the ground. What we watch is five boys watching this young woman. The eponymous “brats” of the film’s title follow Bernadette everywhere, first with their eyes and then by actually stalking her, alone or with her lover Gerard.

 

Truffaut, a film critic who had made his first short Une Visite in 1954, thought of Les Mistons (1957) as his “first real film”. Certainly, it already contains many themes he would continue to explore over his cinematic career – women as objects of desire that seem to mystify men, a certain realist poetry of everyday life, the unexpected rupture presented by death. What interests me most, though, is the theme of adult behaviour – in particular, sexual passion or what Truffaut's narrator calls amour – as seen through the eyes of children. The boys in the film are arrested by this young woman’s beauty, transfixed by the stirrings of a desire they do not even understand, and irritated by the fact of the lovers without quite knowing why.
 
When she leaves her bicycle to swim in a shaded grove, they gather round to sniff it like little puppies, one of them even delivering a slow-motion kiss on the seat where her posterior has recently rested. Categorised only as “unbearable”, the one-sided attraction they feel mutates into something else: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”

 

The child on the cusp of adolescence becoming smitten for the first time has been the subject of many books and films over the years. In LP Hartley’s 1953 classic The Go-Between, which Joseph Losey made into a famous 1971 film starring Julie Christie, the young narrator Leo recalls the shaping summer of his childhood in which he first felt attraction. “My sister is very beautiful,” his friend Marcus tells him one day, and after that, “for a time my idea of [Marian] as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented.” Once Leo helps Marian dry her hair, and Hartley describes the immersiveness of the experience evocatively: “I was the bathing suit on which her hair was spread: I was her drying hair, I was the wind that dried it.”

When Marian embarks on a secret, torrid, socially unsuitable affair with a local farmer called Ted Burgess, Leo finds himself turned into their messenger. The child enables the adult relationship. But jealous, torn between his desire to please Marian and his own inarticulate feeling for her, and childishly blind to what is really at stake, he is also the one that brings it to its tragic end.

 

The Go-Between, with its sun-kissed sexual innocence and stark coming of age, is likely to have been among the inspirations for Atonement, Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel, which was adapted into the Joe Wright film. Like Leo, the 13-year-old Briony is responsible for the betrayal that drives apart the two adults she is close to, based on her childish misunderstanding of a charged sexual moment she witnesses between the socially transgressive lovers.
 
Paresh Kamdar’s under-watched, atmospheric film Khargosh (2009) has a very similar story to The Go-Between. The child protagonist Bantu becomes a go-between for his older friend Avneesh, and slowly finds himself enraptured by the girl Avneesh is besotted with, whom the film nicknames Mrityu (Death).
 
More recently, we have had Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, whose take on exploratory sexual urges is several shades darker, and perhaps more layered than any of these other films. For one, Haraamkhor contains two levels of watching and watchers. An adolescent schoolgirl (superbly played by Shweta Tripathi) in a dusty North Indian town becomes morbidly attracted to her maths tuition teacher (a scarily believable Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after she spies on him having sex with his wife. But the 15-year-old Sandhya has her own set of stalkers: two younger boys in the same tuition class, one of whom thinks he is in love with her. The film steers us between these different gazes, refusing to let us rest easy. One moment, we wait with baited breath with Sandhya in an abortion clinic – but then almost immediately find ourselves confronted by her childish exuberance as she licks an ice-cream and ribs her lover-teacher-exploiter about what he’s going to tell his wife. We begin by giggling as the two boys hatch plans for Sandhya to see Kamal naked, because if a man and a woman see each other naked, “toh unki shaadi pakki”. But as the film draws to its denouement, the dusty haze and windmills gather into a terrible, tragic downpour, childish naivete leading somehow inexorably into life-altering errors.

Perhaps, in the end, that is what makes the child’s-eye view so terrifying. Examined through the frank gazes of children, the lives of adults don’t seem that foolproof any more.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Dec 2019

Unfortunately, Him Too.

My Mirror column:

Watching the 1960 classic Shoot the Piano Player in the age of #MeToo makes one realise that most men’s views on women haven’t changed much in 58 years.

Sriram Raghavan might be the biggest film nerd we have among current Hindi film directors, and in his most recent release, the savagely funny Andhadhun, he’s on a roll. The film’s starting premise as a thriller-—what happens when a blind pianist ends up being the only witness to a crime?—is swiftly buried under an avalanche of twists, making it impossible to write about without spoilers.

Watching Andhadhun felt like a rare reprieve in a harrowing week when #MeToo testimonies from media and Bollywood began to make a long overdue dent in Indian patriarchy. So I particularly didn’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t yet had the chance to catch it. Instead, I thought, I’d follow up on one of Raghavan’s references by watching Shoot the Piano Player: Francois Truffaut’s 1960 cult classic from the French New Wave which, like Andhadhun, features a piano player embroiled in a crime.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this sparkling Truffaut film actually turned out to be about men and women: what men think of women, how they behave as a consequence and what women think they must do in response. In other words, things we are still grappling with 58 years later—and doing so badly at that we desperately need #MeToo.

The first scene has a man running in the dark, a car hot on his heels. He careens down an ill-lit pavement and gets knocked out by a lamppost. It feels like film noir. So when another man appears and slaps the fallen man’s face, one doesn’t know whether he is friend or foe. But then the stranger helps him up and says, “I’ve gotta run. She still waits up for me,”—and with that, Truffaut has engineered the first of the nonstop changes of tone that mark this film, from thriller to droll humour.


“I wish I were married, too,” says the first man. The ensuing dialogue tracks the emotional turnarounds of coupledom with a remarkable throwaway honesty: he went with her for a year before developing feelings and buying a ring. Still, the marriage didn’t start well: “I’d watch her over breakfast, wondering how to get rid of her.” “A question of freedom, maybe?” inquires the first man. The second shrugs. When his wife first gave birth, he says, he fell in love with her.


In one of those bits of non-linearity that mark this as a New Wave film, the married man disappears, and the injured man dashes off to a bar to appeal for help to his brother Charlie, the film’s pianist hero (played by French singing legend Charles Aznavour, who in a strange coincidence, passed away at 94 two weeks ago). Jean Cocteau once said, “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.” Here he plays Charlie as a shy man with sad eyes, a half-smile turning down the corners of his mouth. And yet, he is apparently a fount of wisdom on women. “Don’t be afraid of women,” he tells the bar owner Plyne. “They’re not poisonous.” “You don’t really believe that,” responds Plyne.


What’s remarkable is that this exchange takes place after a sequence featuring men doing the following: (1) singing a song complaining about a bargirl who wouldn’t “hand out” anything but beer; (2) drunkenly proposing marriage to a woman just met—and when told she isn’t single, leaning in for a kiss so that she has to flee claiming work; (3) dancing with such a laser-like focus on his dance partner’s breasts that she is moved to ask scathingly, “Is my chest that fascinating?” (Yes, says the man, I’m a doctor.)


None of these interactions are ‘serious’, and I too might have glossed over them if we hadn’t been in the historical moment we’re in. But it is hard not to see that this ‘humour’ lies at the root of our problem with consent: as Laurie Penny put it in a stellar 2017 essay, the assumption that men want sex—and women are sex. The nonstop infringement of women’s boundaries is completely normalised: this, we are told, is what men will do if women let them. It thus becomes women’s job to keep men from harassing them.

In another comic sequence, a hood who’s abducted Charlie and his girlfriend Lena says he has an “eye for a moment”: “when the wind’s going to lift a skirt, or some nice legs gonna board a bus”. “I tell you. No matter what women say, they all want it,” agrees Hood No. 2. Why else do they all dress up, why do they wear stockings when they could wear socks like us? The exchange is not criticised, though Truffaut punctures its ludicrousness when Hood No. 2 says immediately, ah yes, women would look great in knee-length socks.

In another revealing scene, a besotted Plyne pleads with Lena to “feel his muscles”, saying “I’m not just anybody”. She mocks him, and a minute later, he is declaring that “She’s a slut! She’s not a girl, she’s not a woman. A woman is pure, delicate, fragile. To me, women have always been supreme.”


The film sets Charlie up in contrast to these men. He is the supposedly sensitive man that women fall in love with. When Lena gets together with him, she says it’s because he doesn’t play the ladies’ man or the tough guy. “You’re shy, you respect women.” And yet the tenor of Charlie’s relationships is tragic for the women concerned: his waitress wife Theresa sleeps with a customer to get Charlie his break as a concert pianist, and like Lena later, ends up dead because of him.


Charlie’s father used to say about women, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Perhaps, just perhaps, that might be what Truffaut is really saying about men.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Oct 2018.