Totally Truffaut: 23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker (Preview)
by Anne Gillain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 310 pp., illus. Hardcover: $125.00, Paperback: $35.00 and E-book: $17.99.

Reviewed by Adrian Martin

Anne Gillain has never seen a film by François Truffaut that she doesn’t like. In Totally Truffaut—her second major analytical work on the director, after François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (1991, translated 2013)—she is full of praise, as expected, for the canonical masterpieces, including The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), and Day for Night (1973). She carries a special torch for certain key works that she feels to be, for various reasons, somewhat underrated—Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Two English Girls (1971/1984), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), The Green Room (1978), The Last Metro (1980), and The Woman Next Door (1981). For her, The Soft Skin (1964) is “profound,” The Wild Child (1970) possesses “semiotic power,” and Small Change (1976) is “a wholly successful tour de force.” 

Yet even those titles that critical consensus (for whatever that’s worth) rates as resolutely minor bring forth surprisingly passionate defenses from Gillain. A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972) is “a work of incomparable vigor, one that deserves rehabilitation”; the “failure” of Love on the Run (1979) “imparts a certain substance to [it]”; while Truffaut’s final testament, Confidentially Yours (1983), has “an utterly outlandish story” that is “enchanting.”

The key to Gillain’s approach is signaled by her remarks on the very few entries in Truffaut’s filmography that she considers relatively slight. (For, in her view, there are no entirely bad films in this pack of twenty-three!) Even here, she can whip up her interpretative enthusiasm. The early short Les Mistons (1958) “is a small film no doubt, but one that is infinitely graceful and precious, and for anyone interested in the dynamic of Truffaut’s imagination, a prototype of the work to come.” The Bride Wore Black (1967) may be “well-made but inconsequential”; nonetheless, it “includes a marvelous segment that makes it worth our while.” In the case of Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Gillain offers a still more strenuous assertion: “There is a way of watching Fahrenheit 451, however, that makes the work, whose formal beauty is undeniable, profoundly engaging.” 

What is this “way of watching”? Gillain is after more than a merely identifiable “signature style” or a set of recurring themes (and variations) in Truffaut—things that previous writers have covered to the point of tedium. She is on the track of something much stronger and, well, “total”—a unique logic that can grasp the interaction of both content and form, small details and overarching structures, constant factors and evolutionary currents. The good news is that she achieves this considerable goal superbly and persuasively. Few film books are such a sheer, infectious pleasure to read; like a Truffaut movie, it drives you from chapter to chapter in an unstoppable rhythm.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2