Truffaut, Francois

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    ‘Face’ Review: Close Encounters

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    Commissioned by the Louvre, the film brings together two of cinema’s unforgettable faces, Lee Kang-sheng and Jean-Pierre Léaud.There are some filmmakers whose cinema can be distilled into a single face. François Truffaut is one of them: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s roguish mien became, through Truffaut’s films, synonymous with the spirit of the French New Wave. The Malaysian Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, a devotee of Truffaut, is another. His films double as a record of the face of his muse, Lee Kang-sheng, captured closely in all its gradations over time.Commissioned by the Louvre Museum, Tsai’s 2009 film, “Face,” brings Lee and Léaud’s great visages together. Lee plays a director, Kang, who is in Paris to film a movie in the Louvre about the biblical story of Salome. Léaud plays an aging actor named Antoine — like his character in Truffaut’s films — while Fanny Ardant (Truffaut’s partner until his death in 1984) appears as a vexed producer.Time is the narrative principle in “Face.” Scenes of extended duration invite us to explore details within the frame, as one might with a painting, while the impending death of Kang’s ailing mother (Lu Yi-ching) casts a shadow of mortality over the film — particularly over Léaud and Lee, who appear at times like past and future reflections of one another.The film unfolds as a series of tableaux whose preciousness is tempered by hints of perversity: lust, incest, slapstick and, above all, the strange labor of filmmaking. At one point, we see Laetitia Casta, who plays Salome, in extreme close-up as Kang’s crew debates how to make her look colder. His assistants wipe her cheeks and rub ice on them while she remains uncomfortably silent. Her face is both a decorative mask and a fragile container of roiling emotion, encapsulating the wry duality of Tsai’s cinema.FaceNot rated. In French, Mandarin and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The 400 Blows,’ a Directing Debut That Still Astonishes

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      In 1959, François Truffaut premiered his first film, about a Parisian boy playing hooky, and moviemaking hasn’t been the same since.One of the most impressive debuts in film history, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” created a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere. It was voted the best foreign film of the year by New York film critics — a movie that “brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.Showing for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration, the movie is not only crucial to one’s film education but well worth revisiting.“Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine,” Crowther noted. As a critic, Truffaut was particularly harsh on French “quality” films — so much so that Cannes denied him accreditation in 1958. Revenge was swift when he returned the following year and won the award for best director. (Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus” received the Palme d’Or. The third French film in competition, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” came up empty.)“The 400 Blows” has two stars. One is the then-14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and thus began a career as the embodiment of the French new wave. The other is the city of Paris — gray, grimy and glorious — the arena for Antoine’s fleeting joys and petty crimes.Antoine is an unwanted child, as was Truffaut. Punished by his teacher, rejected by his self-centered mother (Claire Maurier), he plays hooky, runs away from home, steals a typewriter, gets busted trying to return it, is booked by the cops and winds up in reform school. The movie is full of actual incidents from Truffaut’s childhood, including his fabricating his mother’s death as an excuse for truancy. Few movies have been so personal.“The 400 Blows” is dedicated to the critic André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, who died just as the movie began shooting. The early scenes of the boy’s classroom misadventures strongly recall “Zero de Conduite,” the 1933 sendup of French education, directed by Truffaut’s great influence, Jean Vigo. There are other, more inside references, including the unlikely notion that Antoine’s parents might see a quasi-underground work-in-progress by Truffaut’s colleague Jacques Rivette, “Paris Belongs to Us.”“The 400 Blows” is a landmark film for several reasons. It was likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature, and as such caused Truffaut’s parents considerable distress. It also introduced one of the 1960s’ most resilient clichés — the concluding freeze-frame close-up. Truffaut got the idea from Harriet Andersson’s accusatory stare at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika” (as noted when Antoine steals a lobby card of Andersson’s “Monika”). But building on the wistful refrain that runs throughout, “The 400 Blows” ends on a note of sadness all its own.Truffaut and Leaud returned several times to the character of Antoine Doinel. Film Forum is showing “The 400 Blows” with rotating screenings of later films like “Stolen Kisses” and “Love on the Run.” The character survives and even thrives. Yet it is the heartbreaking last shot of “The 400 Blows” that will fix his identity for as long as there are movies.The Four Hundred BlowsSept. 23 through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org More