Truffaut: A Biography

The mass movie audience knows him best as the sweet French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but François Truffaut (1932-1984) made his first thunderous impact on world cinema as "that young thug of journalism." In the 1950s, as this culturally savvy biography by two French film journalists reminds us, Truffaut and a group of like-minded friends at the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma blasted traditional French film as too literary and polished. They proclaimed the birth of rougher, more personal moviemaking by "auteurs" (directors who wrote their own scripts) who were as intoxicated by the medium's possibilities as by the classic Hollywood movies these Young Turks adored. Truffaut practiced what he preached in early films like The Four Hundred Blows and Jules and Jim, which electrified a new generation of American directors who came of age in the 1960s. His private life was just as unconventional: though divorced from his first wife in 1965, they remained business associates through his many affairs with actresses (to whom he was also chronically unfaithful), and he even moved back in with her for a while when the brain tumor that ultimately killed him made it impossible to function alone. His biographers convey all this turbulent material with Gallic lucidity and toughness, seeing no need to make their subject conventionally lovable by softening his sharp edges. --Wendy Smith