The Criterion Collection distributes classic foreign and independent films on home video, but the company is removing all of its movies from Netflix streaming by the end of 2011. Instant Cue suggests Criterion titles still available on Netflix by focusing on a different filmmaker each week.
Film history can be split into two halves — before and after the French New Wave. The directors of this late 50s and 60s revolution broke the rules of conventional narrative cinema with their jump cuts, irreverent voice-overs and disregard for continuity. One of the most important figures in this movement was Francois Truffaut, whose semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (1959) is often considered the first great film of the movement. Today, Truffaut’s legacy is in part overshadowed by that of his more radical peer, Jean-Luc Godard. Both men were geniuses in their own right, but Godard’s films were sometimes dense and academic. With films like Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962), Truffaut was always drunk on the possibilities of cinema, playing with different genres and tricks, but always rooted in character and human emotions.
Few films are as playful yet tragic as Truffaut’s riff on the American gangster movie, Shoot the Piano Player. Loosely speaking, this mix of thieves, tragedy and romance has a plot: Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour) plays piano at a small dance joint for a living, but thanks to his brothers, he and his lover Lena (Marie Dubois) are hiding from a couple of mobsters. Although the film has something resembling a narrative thrust (unlike Godard’s most complex films), Truffaut has fun using editing, voice-over and other techniques to take the classic American B-movie and turn it into something more playful and also more profound.
Truffaut uses cinematic techniques to pull us in and out of the minds of the characters. Charlie is guarded and self-conscious. When walking next to Lena early in the film, he talks to himself, heard in voice-over, about asking her to get a drink. Once he finally musters up the courage, the camera tracks back to reveal that she walked away long before. Subtly using framing and sound, Truffaut brings us into the thoughts of the characters with a sense of humor, but also with an understanding attitude.
Just as Charlie is apparently carefree but haunted by a dark past, Shoot the Piano Player manages to touch upon a wide spectrum of emotions without ever feeling incoherent. At one point in the film, French words appear on the screen for a sing-along, and Truffaut essentially invites us to participate. This might be jarring and seemingly distracting at first, but the cinematic form matches the reckless attitudes of the characters on the screen. The movie moves to the beat of its own drum and refuses to play by any rules. In an extended flashback revealing Charlie’s haunting past and true identity, the film takes a much more somber tone. Truffaut rebels against the confines of straightforward narrative and explores the ability of movies to make us nostalgic, happy or sad.
The types of formal and emotional experimentation seen in Shoot the Piano Player are also integral to Truffaut’s tragicomic Jules and Jim, “perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of those first astonishing [French New Wave] films,” according to Roger Ebert. Jules, an Austrian, and Jim, a Frenchman, are best friends at the brink of WWI. The film follows the duo and their relationship with a mysterious French woman named Catherine in the decades leading up to WWII. To chronicle the passion of the love triangle, Truffaut’s film dramatically shifts from joyous camaraderie to crushing tragedy. Yet it all feels like an organic unified whole, just as the very different characters find their lives intertwined.
In perhaps the most famous scene of the film, Catherine, disguised as a man, races Jules and Jim across a bridge, and the tracking handheld camera gives us the feeling of running alongside the characters. Running to catch up is perhaps the most accurate way of describing the first act of the film. It is marked by quick cuts, swift pans and the voice of an all-knowing and deliciously dry narrator. The bond between the three characters is sexy and light. Catherine tells the men that she used to never smile, and each time she poses to dramatically mimic the joyless expressions of her past years, the film freezes to convey her emotions. Truffaut calls attention to the artifice of the film in a manner that still communicates the underlying feelings of his characters. Each technical choice is not a matter of showing off but instead a careful decision with some sort of intent.
If the fast-paced editing and almost constant narration of the first act of Jules and Jim conveys seemingly innocent joy, the long takes and extended conversations of the rest of the film convey the complex maneuvering of the characters. The friendship of Jules and Jim is not only tested by their mutual love for the same unpredictable woman, but the war between their two countries as well. They are separated from their respective lovers in the trenches of WWI, yet their deepest fear is killing their best friend. This political subtext is subtle, and the manner in which Truffaut integrates it into the narrative of the film not only shows his understanding of history and the human condition, but also his skill as a storyteller.
The accessibility of Truffaut’s films in spite of their jarring break from filmmaking conventions makes sense. In 1977, Truffaut acted in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a French scientist in charge of UFO-related government activity. In 2001, Godard used the film In Praise of Love to viciously criticize Spielberg for his capitalistic and opportunistic mentality. The different reactions to one of America’s most famous mainstream filmmakers are indicative of Truffaut’s relative tendency to embrace more personal and story-driven films. This is not to suggest that Truffaut is necessarily better than Godard. (In fact, I probably prefer Criterion titles by Godard such as Breathless and Pierrot le fou to anything by Truffaut.) However, there is something to be said about the way Truffaut used the cinema as a space to contemplate the complexities of human interaction. Films like Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim feel new half a century later, and although it is not necessary to watch them multiple times to enjoy them, revisiting each is always a rewarding experience.
You can sign on to your Netflix account now to stream The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim or Bed and Board.