For the 40th anniversary of his death, television is paying tribute to François Truffaut, figure of the New Wave, with classics like “The Four Hundred Blows” and a new and moving documentary.
“François Truffaut, the scenario of my life” was presented in May at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Classics section, a branch created twenty years ago and focused around restored prints and documentaries.
This 1h37 film will be broadcast on Friday on France 5. It is about fathers. His biological father that the filmmaker sought, his spiritual father, André Bazin, pillar of Cahiers du Cinéma, and the father that he himself has become.
The production is by David Teboul, author of documentaries on Brigitte Bardot and Sigmund Freud, supported in this project by Serge Toubiana, film critic and biographer of Truffaut. It was the latter who introduced him to the Truffaut family and allowed the documentarian to access his raw material.
A few months after his death (October 21, 1984 at the age of 52, following a brain tumor), the director wanted to confide in his childhood friend, Claude de Givray, to delve into his tormented family history. But there will be no time to complete this autobiographical work.
This finds its conclusion here with “François Truffaut, the scenario of my life”, rich in correspondence – read by actors and actresses like Isabelle Huppert or Pascal Greggory -, interviews with Truffaut and unpublished documents.
The film is particularly moving through the harshly violent epistolary exchanges between François Truffaut, his mother and the man who raised him, but is not his father. What the future filmmaker discovered, as a teenager, by chance, when he came across his birth certificate: “Born of unknown father”.
– Adolescent burns –
The author of “Jules and Jim” thus writes to his “legal father” that he was not “mistreated” but “untreated”. And to remember the burns of adolescence, like when his parents left him alone for three Christmases. Or when they said in his presence “summer is coming, what do we do with the kid?”, only to leave on their own, without him. Scene that he transposed onto film in “The Four Hundred Blows”.
Once he becomes a recognized director, François Truffaut will hire a private detective to search for his biological father.
The filmmaker will come to the conclusion that his real father is Jewish and that his mother’s family, who are anti-Semitic, rejected him. The film suggests that François Truffaut’s mother, placed in a center for unmarried mothers, will retain resentment towards her son from this stay.
The film ends with a poignant letter that Truffaut had written to two of his daughters, from the United States where he had gone for work (he notably acted for Steven Spielberg in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”). Missive full of warmth, tenderness and humor. The complete opposite of what he had known as a child.
The broadcast of this documentary is followed Friday evening on France 5 by “Les quatre cent coups”, his masterstroke. But the week-tribute will have started on Monday, with the broadcast on Arte of “Stolen Kisses”, another Truffaut standard, followed on the same channel by a documentary on his favorite actor, “The Cinema of Jean-Pierre Léaud”. unpublished and signed Cyril Leuthy.
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