I’ve got a sentimental attachment to François Truffaut’s last film, “Confidentially Yours” (“Vivement Dimanche!,” literally, “looking forward to Sunday”), which I discuss in the clip above; I saw it in Paris on the day it opened, in August, 1983, together with Maja, who is now my wife. The film is a love story, and in it Truffaut is manifestly exulting in the joy of his own love story—its lead actress, Fanny Ardant, was, according to Truffaut’s biographers Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, the director’s “last great love.” (Their first film together was “The Woman Next Door,” from 1981.) The film is also a witty and loving tribute to the American mysteries, and in particular the films of Alfred Hitchcock, which he was one of the first critics to celebrate as works of art, in the nineteen-fifties. It turns out that the look back was a sort of ground-clearing for a new artistic direction, one that Truffaut didn’t live to take. Truffaut’s biographers report that he was unhappy with the script of “Confidentially Yours” and was planning a series of ambitious films that would be more carefully prepared—notably, a mini-series set in the Belle Epoque; a post-Napoleonic drama about a seductive nobleman who conceals his horrific war wounds under a mask; an adaptation of an autobiographical story by Paul Léautaud about his abandonment by his mother; and a Bluebeard-like story of a literal lady-killer:
These ambitions reflected an outward change in circumstances, due to the election of François Mitterrand, a Socialist, as the president of France, in 1981. The veterans of ’68 who came to power along with him had been raised on—indeed, inspired by—the New Wave, which now reaped the fruits of the centralized and quasi-governmentalized French system. Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol all greatly increased the pace of their production; Truffaut, who was struck by symptoms from a brain tumor several days after the film’s opening, never made another film, and died on October 21, 1984, at the age of fifty-two.
Godard is seventy-nine; his “Film Socialisme” premièred at Cannes in May. The eighty-two-year-old Rivette’s “Around a Small Mountain” just ended its first run in New York. Chabrol is eighty; his 2008 feature “Bellamy,” starring Depardieu, opens in New York later this year. Rohmer died in January of this year at the age of eighty-nine; his last feature, “The Romance of Astrée and Céladon,” from 2007, will be featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s near-complete retrospective that runs from August 18th through September 3rd. There is a last film by Truffaut; there are no late films.
