Read Online Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online

Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's half-lost, half-damaged alter ego. This rich theme of fractured childhood and the search for a salvaging parent figure climaxes in Truffaut's painful and pessimistic masterpiece, L'Enfant sauvage, the tale of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, and Dr. Itard, his potential saviour. But while Truffaut's own story was that of a wild boy tamed and helped by a surrogate father (the film critic André Bazin), one finally consoled and fulfilled by learning to speak the language of film, L'Enfant sauvage is a bleak example of the story not working out. For all Itard's patience, inventiveness, and occasional exasperated toughness, small breakthroughs fail to lead to larger ones. Victor cannot finally be helped, the damage being too great for more than superficial remedy; he manages to pick up a few words and a few tricks, but fails to master language in such a way as to bring true communication and possible consolation.
    Truffaut was lucky to find the right language himself. He was, in the phrase he applied to Vigo, “a spectator who fell in love with films.” At fifteen he founded a ciné-club, at eighteen he started as a film critic. His life thereafter was utterly in and of the cinema, that place of light and warmth as rain and darkness descend outside. He was writer, director, actor, co-producer, critic, historian, interviewer, and activist. “Films are smoother than life,” Truffaut explains to Léaud on celluloid in La Nuit américaine. “For people like you and me, our happiness lies in films.” His private life also unreeled much within the surrogate family of the cinema: he married the daughter of a leading French distributor and producer; many of his affairs were with actresses.
    “Films resemble the people who make them,” he wrote. In his published letters, as in his films, Truffaut is genial, accessible, humorous, and melancholy. He is affectionate, playful, stylish; not averse to luxury (“Better to weep in a Jaguar than in the Métro”); instinctive rather than intellectual, an autodidact with some of that breed's hectoring propensities. He is wary of theory, just as he is wary of those who claim to love humanity in the abstract; he prefers the specific instance and the particular individual. The only shocking thing to emerge from his letters is that he was a small man who had a fetishistic collection of Eiffel Towers. And the only strikingly unFrench thing is a complete lack of interest in food. Lapsing for a moment into theory, he comes up with a surprising, and surprisingly pat, reason: “Bruno Bettelheim explains that, with food, one has the same relationship as with one's mother, and I really believe that that's the case with me. The fact remains that an hour after a meal I am incapable of saying what I ate.” In his letters Truffaut's mother is as scarce as a menu: she pops up only to comment acerbically that La Peau douce is “a little less vulgar” than Jules et Jim.
    “Good films are ones that are made in ordinary rooms, with one's backside on a chair.” And the professional problems that beset Truffaut were also ordinary: the nouvelle vague could not vaporize the old frustrations. There was the slipperiness of finance; the moaning of writers whose work has been adapted and therefore traduced (Maurice Pons disapproved of Bernadette's bicycle in Les Mistons, while David Goodis liked Tirez sur le pianiste much less when he saw it with subtitles: his ignorance of French had previously allowed him to believe that the film was being more faithful to his book); the uppitiness of some actors; the cecity of critics; and the inaccurate praise of fans (Truffaut once met some Alabaman film buffs who congratulated him on a hitparade of movies, none of which he had actually made).
    Truffaut's evident lovability and his professional cheerfulness enclosed an undertow of gloom—he made Jules et Jim “under the impression that it's going to be amusing and discovering as I go along