AIn cinema, we call it a revival; in literature, a reissue. For the 40th anniversary of the death of François Truffaut, at the age of 52, Éric Neuhoff changed the cover and updated the preface of his Open letter to the filmmaker published in 1987. It is not a banal hagiography, but the fraternal, nostalgic gesture of a film buff to the one he considers, with Claude Sautet, as “the master standard of French cinema”. “Truffaut is still there. […] For him, no purgatory,” he notes.
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This is an opportunity to recall what links us forever – the taste for freedom and romance – to the filmmaker of Four Hundred Blows which immediately touched the public and made Jean-Pierre Léaud-Antoine Doinel, his double, his spiritual son in twenty-four images per second.
“For Truffaut, cinema was like a lifeline,” writes Éric Neuhoff. He came close to delinquency, joined the army before deserting, and dabbled in prison. Born to an unknown father, he found a protector in the person of the critic André Bazin. The young Turk Notebooks owes him everything. »
“Deneuve is here”, “Fanny Ardant is keeping watch”
From the first pages, the tone is set, direct, complicit, facing this “man next door” who wears leather jackets and knitted ties, loves books and women's legs – “these compasses which survey in all directions the terrestrial globe, giving it its balance and harmony. “His voice with its veiled timbre, so particular, his astonished eyes, his disarming smile, all this hid a great melancholy,” underlines the letter writer. In his new preface, he warns him friendly: times have changed. Not sure he likes them. Luckily: “Deneuve is there”, “Fanny Ardant is keeping an eye on things” but “Antoine Doinel is a very old gentleman”.
Éric Neuhoff recounts his personal memories, multiplies anecdotes and examines black and white photos. That of Jeanloup Sieff where Truffaut sits quietly on a public bench, another where he appears in boxing gloves on the set of Jules and Jimor even in New York after his Oscar for best foreign film for American Night (1973). “The fury of the movie buff that you were,” he remarks. You felt that a lot of other films would have deserved this award. In rage, you swell your mouth like Belmondo. » Without forgetting this other photo where he is laughing alongside Jean-Luc Godard, whom he will treat, after their falling out, as “shit on a pedestal”.
ALSO READ “François Truffaut: the scenario of my life”: the documentary which takes another look at the filmmaker’s workWe follow him around Paris, from the Galignani bookstore to the Le Champollion cinema. We find him at the Tivoli Hotel in Lisbon, where he filmed Soft Skin with Françoise Dorléac, and we imagine the meeting on a riverboat between him, the man of the left, and Lucien Rebatet, the fascist, undoubtedly to discuss the Occupation before the filming of Last Metro.
Like his master Hitchcock, the filmmaker likes to slip furtively into his films. He is spotted driving a convertible in Pocket moneynewsagent in Love on the slysoldier in The Story of Adèle H. Affected by this disease called “truffalditis”, Neuhoff brings together like a puzzle all the pieces of a cinematic life, Mistons has Looking forward to Sunday. In 136 pages to read in one go, it paints a vivid portrait of a secret and luminous man who said: “Films are more harmonious than life. »
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
“Open letter to François Truffaut”by Éric Neuhoff, Albin Michel, September 2024, 144 pages, 15 euros.
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