The protagonist years hence.
Like many of my generation, I was exposed to the nouvelle vague auteur Francoise Truffaut not through the hallowed hall of the art house or French Cinema 101 in college. It was through America’s preeminent maker of movies Steven Spielberg and his (first) study of man-extraterrestrial communion Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Truffaut’s cameo as a ufologist accorded the film a sort of ersatz New Wave accreditation, seal of approval from the grandsire of the new cinema, which Spielberg and others would later transmute into the blockbuster.
My next introduction to Truffaut came in the form of satire when in Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind, written by Rick Harper and Bob Rogers (no one claimed a director’s credit), a gentleman who played the “famous French scientist” with a Steve Martin-esque French accent did his best to ape the filmmaker who was his inspiration.
The next time I encountered Truffaut was on my parent’s bookshelf upon which was a published version of the 400 Blows shooting script – the black and yellow “used” tag on the spine indicating that it was from college. I ached through the rather staid translation, obliged to do so by the budding cineaste within me.
Next was when I was in college in some order of film studies class. The 400 Blows, didn’t have the same effect on my subversive spirit as Goddard did (despite my father’s vituperative dismissal of the man’s oeuvre, thus making my appreciation of him all the more rebellious). The young, rapscallion protagonist, Antoine Doinel, didn’t resonate with me until years later after Truffaut had revisited the characters’ exploits in a handful of other films now available in a box set from the Criterion Collection (Francois Truffaut’s Adventures of Antoine Doinel). I was the age of the character in the last of his appearances in Love on the Run. I was single, living in Venice, CA, trapped in an endless development cycle for a TV show. The only activity that got me through those days was strolling into Santa Monica and renting DVDs at a joint called Vidiot’s. The staff, nearly all cineastes (such that the FAQ on their website insists that Quentin Tarantino did not work there), organized the films by director. The Truffaut shelf beckoned after Goddard’s Woman is a Woman bored me to tears. However, I thought I’d be clever and watch Truffaut’s series backwards, watching Doinel age backward – from age 32 to 12. The effect was chilling, as it would be, surely, for anyone looking back over the last 20 years. My life was not dissimilar. I had made all the same rash decisions, mistakes and oversights to which youth is prone. How did you do?
