French film festival goes retrospective

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): A prominent name in contemporary French cinema is the subject of a retrospective at Teater Tertutup, Taman Ismail Marzuki, this week: Francois Truffaut.

First a film critic and then a director, Truffaut was a key figure in the radicalism that crept into French film-making from the 1950s. Radicalism which created the "new wave" classic A Bout de Souffle. Truffaut wrote the screenplay of this seminal film and in the latter half of the decade was collaborating closely with Jean-Luc Godard (an even bigger name in French cinema).

Early in the 1950s Godard, Truffaut and others, set out to change the landscape of French film culture for good. Truffaut mounted a challenge against tradition with his famous article on a 'certain tendency' in film. A key concept was the idea of author (i.e. the director) as the ultimate authority on a film's meaning - an argument that would get Truffaut into trouble today. Essentially a film director was quite simply an artist, as creative as any poet or painter. It follows, neatly, that cinema is art.

Revolutionary thinking - for the time. Today the notion of 'author', in film or in any other medium, is contentious. Now we are wondering 'What is an author?' Can a film have an author? If it can, then who - the cinematographer, the screenwriter, the editor? Is making film and its meaning a collaborative activity, or orchestrated by a single vision, or both? When we talk about Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and we say Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, is author status a given?

But in the 1950s the notion of 'author' was radical and a tool - a way to look anew at classic Hollywood - the ageless John Ford western, the nasty but brilliant thriller of Alfred Hitchcock. And it was a way of debunking popular French cinema of the time.

How? How else but by sending it up? Thus there are many elements of Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) which invite comparison with the traditional romantic drama. There is to begin with many settings that looked staged. In these sequences the camera does not draw attention to itself but stays pretty well on the spot to allow character action and dialog and setting to dominate the image. But every now and then, Truffaut's hand (that is to say, the hand of Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer) 'slips' and we see the camera swish quickly between characters in conversation. Instead of cutting, the camera moves abruptly and disconcertingly, and the image blurs until it refocuses on its new subject. This sort of thing is a key to what Truffaut and his colleagues of the 'new wave' in French cinema were up to. Their aim was to distance audiences from the reality effect which involves an audience in film and to show up the editing, the camerawork, the acting - all the things that go together to give an impression of realism.

Like so many of Truffaut's films, Jules et Jim is intensely intimate. The lives of Jules, a German, and Jim, a Frenchman, intersect in 1912. They are joined by vivacious Catherine, also French (Jeanne Moreau), who is at first boyish fun to be with and then becomes the amorous center of the trio. They form a team of sorts, each happy to play follow the leader, all three clowning, Chaplin-style, complete with bowler hat, cane and, sometimes, moustache. They live together until Jules and Catherine pair off, despite a lingering attraction between Jim and Catherine.

World War I intervenes and Jules and Jim discover the horror of trench warfare, but from opposite sides, each afraid they might be involved in killing the other. This episode uses black- and-white documentary footage which blends in with the black-and- white stock Truffaut chose for his film. things looks seamless at this point. 'With our averages maybe we'd make a good couple.' Jules and Catherine decide to put each of their numerous liaisons behind them, and to marry. They have a child, a little girl they call Sabine and settle in the countryside. Then Jim comes to visit them. Later on he leaves, then he returns again.

Perhaps it was the point she made when she jumped into the river once, perhaps it was the perfume bottle full of sulfuric acid she kept at the ready for lovers who tell lies, perhaps it was her infidelities, but Catherine retains a dangerous quality. The drama she created is constantly undercut by the peaceful relationship between the two men. She plans her final journey, she will take Jim with her. It is an extravagant gesture, but in the end, also funny.

In this film (which is really a story about a story of romantic love) the actors may seem to be acting, self-consciously quoting their lines, playing their parts. The narrator reinforces this impression and so does the editing and camerawork. You will see a number of moments of frozen motion, when the image is held with a freeze-frame. Sometimes the camera appears to have a life of its own, free of any particular character's point of view. This distances us from the goings-on, it offers us a place 'outside' the film, disconnected from the emotional life of the story. A critical distance.

Narrated with voice-over, Jules et Jim has the ache of personal experience, but contradicting this there is a droll humor which lifts the mood - even when two of the protagonists have been cremated and are no more than papery charred remains inside a burial; One casket! How can this be? It is not the tale, but it is the telling.

Other films of the festival:

* Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960). A key film of the French nouvelle vogue (new wave), which came out at around the same time as A Bout de Souffle, aka Breathless (Ignore that Hollywood version with Richard Gere!). A story of lovers and gangland murder, told while acknowledging its debt to Hollywood. Charles Aznavour in the lead role.

* Baisers Voles (1968). With Jean-Pierre Leaud, a key lead actor in many Truffaut's autobiographical-type films of the time. Another three-hander, but this time with two women and one man. Prominent female actor of French modernist film, Delphine Seyrig, also stars.

* Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1971). Jean-Pierre Leaud becomes involved with two women, Englishwomen this time. The dilemma of a young man, the conflicting needs of two women - and the eternal triangle.

* L"Homme qui Aimait les Femmes (1977). This is the original Intersection, the original version of the film which has been screening here (with Richard Gere, again!) recently.

* La Chambre Verte (1978). The dead - his wife and lost friends - seem to surround Julien (played by Francois Truffaut himself) since the catastrophe of World War I. His obsession with necrology draws him into a mystery over which he has little control. Nathalie Baye (as Cecilia) draws him further in.

* La Femme d'a Cote (1981). The woman across the road may be more than your neighbor, she could might be a long lost lover. For Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) and Mathilde (Fanny Ardant), now both married too others, their affair could bring one or both to the emotional brink.

* Le Dernier Metro (1980). Two icons of the French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, together in a tale about the world of stage theater under the regime in power in France in 1942. A strong narrative about politics and psychology, with equally strong performances.