Now for some Truffaut.

Shoot the Pianist (1960), directed by Francois Truffaut. A Hitchcokian delight, Shoot the Pianist plays with genre, blending gangster film, noir, comedy, romance, and psychological study. Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour) may not have vertigo, but he is timid to a fault. And he manages to have two women killed, the first his wife who tosses herself off a five-story balcony, and the second the woman who wishes to bring Charlie back to his earlier self, the concert pianist, Edouard Saroyan. The film has the look of several noirs, including On Dangerous Ground and Nightfall, both having narratives that move the action from the city to the snowy countryside. The opening shot of the inside of a piano serves to set things in motion. We are going to meet a musician and learn something of his insides. He expresses himself through music; he has also made of his feelings something of a mechanical expression. Charlie’s music moves between highbrow (Chopin, Ravel, etc.) to jazz (he mentions Art Tatum and Errol Garner) to the tinkling dance music, just as Truffaut’s film moves or slides through genres. Perhaps the bit I like most is the bit picked up by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, in the two hitmen who debate the features of MacDonald’s hamburgers. Here we have two thieves/murderers who talk incessantly about the features of women. This is a film that exudes charm.

 

The Soft Skin (1964), directed by Francois Truffaut. This one is about the routine life of a male academic, traveling about giving lectures, having the media follow him about, dropping names, giving out autographs to admiring young women, and having an affair with a flight attendant. Truffault is meticulous in following his characters, watching them push elevator buttons, dial telephones, move indicator levers in an automobile, fill a cigarette box with leftovers from another box, undo a silk stocking, and so on. What thrills in this cinematic exercise is Truffaut’s inventiveness, creating suspense in almost a Hitchcockian manner in a film about the tedium of modern life, dare I say modern academic life? The action is at times quite funny, at other times it communicates pathos. Truffaut is incisive in his depiction of a marital affair and its effects on those involved. The mixture of humour and pathos continues right to the end when our academic male finds out what it means to have the fury of a scorned woman confronting him. Hell indeed. This final shot (in more than one sense) suddenly reminded me that I had, in fact, seen this film before.

Two English Girls (aka Anne and Muriel, 1971), directed by Francois Truffaut. This film, like the earlier Jules and Jim, derives from a novel by Henri Pierre Roche, and the story involves three young people, in this case two women and one man, in a love triangle. The narrative moves carefully and delicately through complicated matters of the heart. The pacing suits the action set at the turn of the nineteenth century; at one point we see a picture of Charlotte Bronte hanging on the wall of the girls’ house in Wales, and this cues the rather quietly torrid emotional content of the film. Rendering things tangled are the relationships both national and individual. The young man (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is from France, the young women (Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter) are from Wales. The two young women are sisters. The mothers of the three have been long time, but geographically distanced, friends. Suffice to say that, as things roll along, the three young folk find themselves in a tangled web of desire, attraction, and confusion. The tennis game played a few times throughout the film is a nice metaphor for the back and forth of emotions between the three. Anyway, what impresses me most about this film is not the rather supressed emotional life of three privileged people, but rather the cinematography of Nestor Almendros. The scenes shot in France especially reflect the palette and compositions of Impressionist painting. Much of the film is gorgeous. As for the story, well its slow burn does show intricacies of human emotional life that are informative and worthy of our attention.

 L'Inferno (1911), directed by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan. Dante’s visit to Hell guided by Virgil gets the filmic treatment here inspired by the 19^th-century illustrations by Gustave Dore. The sets and costumes and designs are, mostly, eye-popping. As Dante descends deeper into Hell, he moves from circle to circle seeing more and more torment and anguish until he finally confronts Lucifer himself who is calmly but hungrily munching away on the body of a human reminding meow that well-known Goya work. At times, such spectacle works and works very well, at other times it falls flat as in the rushing in the a she-wolf played by a quite perky German Shepard. Although visually striking, the vision of a field of torsos imbedded in fire, legs flailing above ground, is amusing rather than terrifying, at least for modern viewers. I daresay viewers in 1911 would have found these images more terrifying than we might. The film tries to give us a sense of a journey, as we watch Dante and Virgil walk hither and yon, but mostly what we have is a series of tableaux, some imaginatively intricate and beautiful.  

Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille is best known as a director of big films, epics with that cast of thousands such as The Ten Commandments (twice), King of Kings, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Crusades, and so on. Here, however, he gives us a domestic comedy. The plot turns on infidelity and divorce, sensitive topics at the time. Young wife Leila (Gloria Swanson) is bored with her unromantic and rather slovenly husband, James Porter (Elliott Dexter). He dresses shabbily, drops cigar ash on the carpet, and insists on eating raw onions. He also makes a lot of money. His friend, slimy Schulyler Van Sutphen (Lew Cody) is out to seduce Leila. He succeeds. She leaves James, marries Schulyler, and discovers the second husband is worth than the first. He is a Lothario of the first degree. This is DeMille, after all, and the film boasts an elaborate fantasy sequence in which Leila imagines a quite different life than the one she has. The goings-on are froth and quite fun. The costumes are elaborate and baroque. Oh, those headpieces. The film offers a pleasant way to spend 70 minutes or so.