“My mother couldn't stand me. I had to make me forget my existence. ” Thirty years after her death, Léa Salamé tries to break through the "Secrets of François Truffaut". In this archive, we see the filmmaker, the raised forehead, the posed voice, who theorizes his erasure behind his art. To determine his personality, the journalist and her team are investigating actresses who have known him, Brigitte Fossey or Andréa Ferréol, and film specialists, including Serge Toubiana and our colleague Éric Neuhoff. Sad and lonely childhood therefore. The boy wanders the streets of Paris and forgets in the dark rooms the indifference of his parents. At 26, with Les Quatre Cents Coups , he will go in search of this lost, " contradictory and tormented" childhood.. Contradictory, it will be him all his life: at the same time intellectual and instinctive, violent in his critiques written in the Cahiers du cinema but tender with his friends, militant with the students in 1968 and bourgeois in the city.
"There is no traffic jam in the movies, there is no downtime , " he professes in American Night . For him, cinema is life finally discovered, the only life really lived. Especially thanks to Jean-Pierre Léaud. From the Four Hundred Blows in 1959 (the actor is 14 years old) to L'Amour on the run in 1979, the two men do not leave each other. "There is an osmosis between them, it's striking," analyzes Éric Neuhoff. A gesture started at Truffaut on set continues at Léaud in front of the camera. Freer, more attractive.
"A charm"
The director loved and dreamed of women. A face inspired him to play a role, to the point of confusing the actress and her character. And from Claude Jade to Jacqueline Bisset, "they all fell in love with him, except me ," smiles Brigitte Fossey. He had a crazy charm ”. Léa Salamé wants to know: Wasn't Truffaut a horrible macho? A film historian opines: he was "obsessed" . Devil! Neuhoff has fun with his definition of cinema: "Make pretty women do pretty things." Salamé considers that he "loved in the old way" . Funny expression. And a curious trial when you know the modesty that Truffaut put on the screen and the modernity of the female figures he invented.
Instead of this discussion, it would have been better to deepen his psychological analysis and mention The Green Room , a black diamond with deadly reflections made in 1978. Truffaut, who embodies a man dedicated to worshiping the missing, strikes with its stiffness.
Jean-Pierre Léaud waits for Léa Salamé at the foot of a tree. He will read, for the first time, a letter written in 1984, on the death of his mentor. We guess over the lines of the young man's voice that the 76-year-old actor was. Nicolas Bedos evokes this cinema which was interested in "things as futile as family or love" . Kids steal typewriters, men fall in love with classified ads, marriage requests are made out of bed. Ah! if only life could be a long film by Truffaut…
