Truffaut: rebel with a cause.

Truffaut took was a 22-year old critic when he took French cinema by storm, in January 1954, with a « Cahiers du cinéma » article : « Une certaine tendance du cinéma français ».

The magazine head editors had nixed an earlier version of the text for the violence of its personal attacks.

Article was a diatribe of rare intensity against post-WW2 French cinema. Truffaut reproached French directors with favouring literary adaptation over original scripts. According to him, this bias led to conventional, academic filmmaking : movies shot in studios, out of synch with their times and French society, corny product fashioned after 1930’s recipes ; what he called, in deprecating fashion : « qualité française ».

Truffaut’s blistering attack triggered the French New Wave and a war in which the older generation of French filmmakers was routed.

A twenty-two year old film critic can be dangerous when he has a personal agenda, particularly to become a filmmaker : for thirty years, the « qualité française » directors were culturally blacklisted, their films mocked and relegated to TV screens ; more than a few deserved their fate.

« Le Dernier Métro » is based on an « original » script : it was not adapted from existing material. But is there anything truly « original » in the script ? Is it not a melting pot of characters and situations already met in many films, books, plays ? Are not some of them, however brilliantly dressed by Truffaut, worn out « clichés ?

But, as in his 1954 article, the script issue is only a starting argument : Truffaut had adapted several books in the past (« La sirène du Mississipi », based on William Irish ; « Fahrenheit 451, based on Ray Bradbury, « Jules et Jim », based on Henri-Pierre Roché...) and the resulting films felt much less « qualité française » than « Le Dernier Métro ».

In « Le Dernier Métro », all that Truffaut exposed with Saint-Just-like violence twenty-five years earlier is back on screen : a period piece shot in studio ; a well-wishing, glamorous movie ; a cliché-ridden, simplistic view of WW2. Talented, academic, old-fashioned filmed entertainment, without a trace of the director’s rebel years.

There is nothing wrong in growing up, and changing one’s mind in the process : the 1968 generation contributed many remarkably successful men of power to the capitalist society.

With respect to Truffaut, the feeling is more disturbing. His past seems less outgrown than erased, like certain characters in Stalin-era photographs, as if his revolt, from the start, had been a fake : the promised revolution in filmmaking only a pretext to get rid of the directors in place and step into their shoes. As if his resentment of « qualité française » had only one true cause : its defenders stood in the way of his ambition.

If such was the case, New Wave was only a tactical weapon to reach power, the cinema equivalent for Truffaut of the Socialist Party for François Mitterrand, as the veteran politician rode the organisation to the presidency of France in May of 1981, a few months after « Le Dernier Métro » triumph on Césars night.

Having paid his dues to New Wave, Truffaut indulges into what he has always longed for : « qualité française » films. After years of struggling with small budgets and making movies on the fringe, he basks in the material comfort of « bourgeois » cinema : lavish budget, studio shoot, stars, assistants...

Maybe this is why he was attracted to Hitchcock and later Spielberg : both directors embody Hollywood, cinema as an industry, public and financial success.

« Le Dernier Métro » expresses a need to please that verges on demagogy, a desire of recognition and love that is nearly painful, also a cold-blooded quest for honours : in Truffaut’s agenda, the film was built as a war machine to sweep the Césars.

He succeeded so well that the film crowned him France’s official filmmaker and nearly gave state artist status as the international flag-bearer of French cinema : his New Wave past made his « bourgeois » present acceptable, as the underground engagement of their youth excused in some politicians’ eyes the embezzlements of their later years.

In 1984, Truffaut would make his most dramatic career move and die of cancer.

However regrettable, it may have been the perfect way out for his ambitions. After too many years of « qualité française » filmmaking, Truffaut’s dominance as the undisputed statesman of French cinema might have known the same sad ending as the Mitterrand era, the start of which had been as acclaimed in 1981 as « Le Dernier Métro ».