Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits Reviews

This exemplary documentary about an icon of international cinema boldly makes the statement that filmmaker Francois Truffaut reinvented himself on film. Through clips from his challenging body of work and exhaustive interviews, this fascinating remembrance of various "Truffauts" past proves its point about a director using his movies as selective autobiography. Rather than adopting a purely chronological approach, Truffaut's biographers, Serge Toubiana and Michel Pascal, trace the director's life like a detective story with evidence gleaned from an array of French film industry celebrities plus family and friends. Unsurprisingly, they say Truffaut's personality shines through his signature film THE 400 BLOWS (1959), a sort of payback for a loveless childhood. In fact, the young hero is a composite of Truffaut and lifelong friend Robert Lachanay, whose bravado the shy Truffaut so admired that he borrowed it for his onscreen persona, Antoine Doinel. The documentary reveals that Truffaut was the illegitimate son of a Jewish dentist; his free-spirited mother married his stepfather to give Truffaut a name. Interviewees say this outcast status and the uncertainty of his mother's love shaped Truffaut's character. Movies became his refuge. Perhaps the clearest indication of his resolve to live through cinema isn't his marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern, whose father financed his first feature, but his opportunistic print campaign for the auteur theory. Truffaut launches his Cahiers du Cinema attack on sacred cows of the French film industry to make a name for himself. While he generously restores the pre-eminence of the director, he shatters several reputations. So intent was he to make feature films, and to exorcise his childhood demons, that he relives his adult life onscreen with the assistance of actor-surrogate, Jean-Pierre Leaud. Eventually, his brand of personal cinema demands that he act in his own movies, as in THE WILD CHILD (1970) and THE GREEN ROOM (1978). Immortalized through vivid classics like JULES AND JIM (1962) and STOLEN KISSES (1968), Truffaut cheats death without ever coming to terms with the little boy he created in THE 400 BLOWS, an aggrieved child he carries with him throughout his life and in all his films. Not only is this celebratory documentary absorbing movie history and expert biography, but it also offers cinephiles an invaluable opportunity to become acquainted with director Claude Chabrol and writer-director Alexandre Astruc, whose interviews are often as reflective of themselves as they are of Truffaut. More importantly, this documentary explores Truffaut's versatile legacy from progenitor of the New Wave to the traditionalist of movies like THE LAST METRO (1980), a classic that the young turk Truffaut might have disparaged in his Cahiers days. Wisely reinforcing its theme of reinvention with clips from Truffaut's oeuvre, FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: STOLEN PORTRAITS transcends the talking-heads genre by letting movies like THE SOFT SKIN (1964) and TWO ENGLISH GIRLS (1972) speak for Truffaut. As a probing examination of what makes a genius tick, this documentary about myth-making is remarkable, not because it gives us all the right answers, but because it forces us to ask the right questions. Although one wonders why no clips were included from STORY OF ADELE H. (1975), whose intense central romance mirrors Truffaut's obsessive love of cinema, the other great films are interwoven adroitly into the texture of Toubiana and Pascal's suppositions about Truffaut. By closing with the comments of actress Fanny Ardant (with whom Truffaut had a daughter), STOLEN PORTRAITS refocuses our attention on the reciprocated affection so many actors felt for this director. Yet, even with the obvious adoration of his compatriots and family, Truffaut's principal love was filmmaking, which provided him with the kind of unconditional love whose absence haunted his childhood and shaped his destiny. (Profanity, adult situations, sexual situations, nudity.)