Soft Skin
Pierre is in a hurry to the airport and almost misses his plane for Lisbon. If he had missed that flight, the events that follow would not have occurred: Truffaut's fourth feature film is study of the delicate balances, or Soft Skin, of life and the important role that circumstances might have in life. The title of the film, The Soft Skin is notable for the multiple images and meanings it suggests. The film's title can refer to Nicole's seductive, soft skin but It can also signify the unstable quality of life.
Pierre Lachenay is a harmless figure, almost a common man. Having achieved certain success in the literary field it seems that he has everything under control. Nicole, apart from her physical appeal, she offers, as a woman, Pierre an opposite angle on life, a non-intellectual and romantic one.
One must note that Truffaut uses this actor to allow us to see him as a common man, that could be anybody. Nicole, for her part, is attracted to Pierre's intellect see likes listening to him, hear him talk and quote, and through the conversation he brings out her own natural intelligence. She brings to him what he does not have and vise-versa.
Quickly Pierre's life self-destructs. He is fully aware of what he is doing and yet there is a clear ambivalence in the acting: he is aware that his wife knows that he is cheating but he still offers Nicole to call her the day after. He does not really want to give up his home life for Nicole and neither does his wife after the incident, yet it seems that the destructive affair cannot cease to continue, an affair that will lead to his own physical destruction.
The Reims sequence is particularly effective in showing that Nicole is not that important to Pierre, and she is even standing in his is business, derailing him from his nature of work by telling him to busy her stockings. The Reims scenes, the breaking up scenes with his wife, and many others, clearly show the film's view of men and women as fundamentally different. Men are intellectual, rational, and cannot express feelings. Women are governed by emotion, and in opposition to the abstract world of men. Franca, like Catherine from Jules and Jim, destroys Pierre, is an idealist she wants to have everything or nothing. The extensive filming of mechanical maneuvers or objects in this film such as at the gas station the camera focuses on the numbers on the pump, and the airplane’s dashboard, the sequences of driving shows the destructive, perhaps unstoppable, irrational power of the eros.
Nicole is beautiful, funny, gracious, and attentional but in the same time inaccessible, like Catherine. She is the ideal woman of Pierre, he treats he as so by photographing her, watching her, and touching her, and making her dress as he wants like in Vertigo. She is not a common mistress since one can note the difference of age, he will call her several times “ma petite fille”, my daughter. This ideal, these photographs will be Pierre’s death sentence, by another woman who also sees her life being destructed. Every character will hurt himself and hurt the person he loves in his turn.
Truffaut in this movie chooses to minimize the dialogues, the neutral tone of Pierre is most noted although the general tone of the movie keeps shifting with the emotions of the women, that can be in two opposites feelings and express them in the same time. Whereas Pierre cannot undo something that had been said “we cannot go backwards like this” says Pierre at the door steps, his face is, almost, always motionless. Yet the camera is very often fast moving, placing successive actions adding much to the nervousness of the plot. And so does the hesitating camera the gives very often Pierre’s point of view, such as the scene in the elevator going up, seeing Nicole leaving, and going down.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Jules and Jim
This is the third movie of Francois Truffaut, after Shoot the Pianist, this is also an adapted movie from a story. After the first "failure" with the Shoot the Pianist, he decides to take the risk and adapt the book of Henri-Pierre Roche.
Throughout the book one can feel through the script, without have reading the book, that the literary aspect has been highly conserved. This was one of the goals that Truffaut, and perhaps, the New Wave wanted to achieve: opting to a different kind of adaptation by respecting the original form of the story though a cinematographic approach. The spectator, without knowing that it is an adaptation, is carried away in a dreamy-like mood, with the help of the off-voice, the collage of voices and images and the music, that one might be in while reading a book, while playing on the aspects of tenderness and coarseness.
To explain the dreamy-like mood mentioned above, one might not that the movie evolves incessantly with an energy that is present throughout the movie, starting from the prologue till the walk out of Jules.
The importance of the off-voice is noted starting from the beginning of the movie describing the two men, showing Jules and Jim together. The off-voice is not used as usually in order to narrate a past or introduce a flash back in order to give simple information; it is omnipresent and plays a role in the placement of the characters and the story itself, with a highly literary expression such as "Round eyes like marbles" among many others. One must note that the importance of the off-voice is not informative but rather to give a tone carried throughout the movie
Therefore the importance of the relation, as we have seen in the Shoot the Pianist and later on with his other movie, between literature and cinema.
Catherine is before all an image of perfection projected a statue and work of art. Before meeting the incarnation of the picture and the statue Truffaut, awaits the spectator perhaps to give a sensation of a dream, fantasy, and admiration that is common is Truffaut's movies. Catherine in this perspective belongs to a different category of women, it is suggested that she is divine.
Like Catherine, the statue and the lady that does not talk at the bar, are mysteries that do not talk or that surprises every time: making the face the important element in the filming. When Catherine appears, her face, like in the filming of the statue, decomposed by a circular movement which contributes to the dreaminess and to the shifting into another dimension. She goes out of realism; she becomes again an image, in order to enter perhaps into this enigma.
We are in the same time, in the present and the past; that is given by the off-voice and the in-voice giving birth to an ambiguous time frame, giving the dynamicity, the energy of the movie. The narration of the first world war using archives pictures, mixing different types of pictures, documentary and fiction. But Truffaut gets this tonality through the autonomy of the camera that goes in a circular motion, like in the game around the table.
Like, later in his movies, Truffaut uses the medium of writing and reading letters to tell love stories between his characters that are so distant from each other, this is an movie in many it parts.
Jules and Jim is built on constant oppositions: past and present, image and reality. Intimacy and public sphere, joy and death. Perhaps to make the movie constantly in relation with the public and grasp their attention, and so creating a sort of common ground.
This is the third movie of Francois Truffaut, after Shoot the Pianist, this is also an adapted movie from a story. After the first "failure" with the Shoot the Pianist, he decides to take the risk and adapt the book of Henri-Pierre Roche.
Throughout the book one can feel through the script, without have reading the book, that the literary aspect has been highly conserved. This was one of the goals that Truffaut, and perhaps, the New Wave wanted to achieve: opting to a different kind of adaptation by respecting the original form of the story though a cinematographic approach. The spectator, without knowing that it is an adaptation, is carried away in a dreamy-like mood, with the help of the off-voice, the collage of voices and images and the music, that one might be in while reading a book, while playing on the aspects of tenderness and coarseness.
To explain the dreamy-like mood mentioned above, one might not that the movie evolves incessantly with an energy that is present throughout the movie, starting from the prologue till the walk out of Jules.
The importance of the off-voice is noted starting from the beginning of the movie describing the two men, showing Jules and Jim together. The off-voice is not used as usually in order to narrate a past or introduce a flash back in order to give simple information; it is omnipresent and plays a role in the placement of the characters and the story itself, with a highly literary expression such as "Round eyes like marbles" among many others. One must note that the importance of the off-voice is not informative but rather to give a tone carried throughout the movie
Therefore the importance of the relation, as we have seen in the Shoot the Pianist and later on with his other movie, between literature and cinema.
Catherine is before all an image of perfection projected a statue and work of art. Before meeting the incarnation of the picture and the statue Truffaut, awaits the spectator perhaps to give a sensation of a dream, fantasy, and admiration that is common is Truffaut's movies. Catherine in this perspective belongs to a different category of women, it is suggested that she is divine.
Like Catherine, the statue and the lady that does not talk at the bar, are mysteries that do not talk or that surprises every time: making the face the important element in the filming. When Catherine appears, her face, like in the filming of the statue, decomposed by a circular movement which contributes to the dreaminess and to the shifting into another dimension. She goes out of realism; she becomes again an image, in order to enter perhaps into this enigma.
We are in the same time, in the present and the past; that is given by the off-voice and the in-voice giving birth to an ambiguous time frame, giving the dynamicity, the energy of the movie. The narration of the first world war using archives pictures, mixing different types of pictures, documentary and fiction. But Truffaut gets this tonality through the autonomy of the camera that goes in a circular motion, like in the game around the table.
Like, later in his movies, Truffaut uses the medium of writing and reading letters to tell love stories between his characters that are so distant from each other, this is an movie in many it parts.
Jules and Jim is built on constant oppositions: past and present, image and reality. Intimacy and public sphere, joy and death. Perhaps to make the movie constantly in relation with the public and grasp their attention, and so creating a sort of common ground.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Love on the Run
This is the recapitulation, the prolongation and the ending of the Antoine Doinel cycle through the probable transition to adulthood. The transition from reality to the literary fiction, starting from the first game words "vais" and "vêts"; laying down the first important issue of "staying" and "leaving", it is a movie that has a double opening, the second time when Antoine open the curtains.
"A work of art can't be a settling of old scores; if it is, the it's not a work of art." The flashback from the precedent movie expresses Truffaut's sentiments and objectives of reconciliation. And through Lucien's "the faults were not entirely theirs" Antoine's incessant run and search of the motherly love can stop; he recognizes her love and the "strange way of showing it".
The "settling" is omnipresent, starting from the beginning with Doinel's Les Salades de l'Amour, interrupting once again the opening of the movie, summarizing the nineteen volumes, seems to underline the importance of this number, and auto-portraying himself in the same time: "Herein lies proof of the poor guy's trouble with women" and his mother's love. Criticizing himself in summarizing gradually with the flashbacks proving again that "the faults were not entirely theirs".
The theme of childhood and reconciliation is also shown through Colette and the Draguignan law-case where she has to defend a man that killed his son, and the fact that she chooses to defend him in spite of the death of her own child, an element that expresses the theme of forgiveness.
In the past Doinel is considered to be self-centered and "egoist", as Colette calls him and Christine before her. The past movies were all about him; here through Colette's narrative the spectator is driven away from Doinel to her own life; although one can recognize in the Draguignan law-case, the similarities between Charles and Antoine: in their marital life; between the murderer and Antoine: the killing of persons (the kid and the consideration of killing the protagonist). The similarities in the speech with Xavier especially when he declares: "I never sell books with the word "Love" in the title".
On must also not the importance of the theme of death, in Colette's law-case and her child as we have seen above. But also in the case of the kid in the train, that is saved at the last moment. And even with the murderer in the cinema, in the movie. One can draw two parallels with Doinel's protagonist, and Truffaut's Doinel; commonly, the three kids that had lack of attention of their parents.
Literature transforms his "true" experiences, like with Balzac in the 400 Blows, Antoine rewrites and reassembles, like in the torn pieces of the picture, his life in short stories in juxtaposed and unordered flashbacks until the last disturbance of the fast moving camera of the last scene, mixed with the 400 Blows. Insisting on the common ground like the handkerchief; or the fact that Sabine kisses him in the cinema while a boxing match is projected, in opposition to the other scene with Christine. Ruptures become reconciliation, like his mother's lover and him in front of her tomb in opposition to the first time Antoine has seen them together. This movie is summarizing, puzzling and suggests a positive "fuite" rather than a closed clear ending, because as they says it themselves in front of the mirror, "we can't be certain it will last".
This is the recapitulation, the prolongation and the ending of the Antoine Doinel cycle through the probable transition to adulthood. The transition from reality to the literary fiction, starting from the first game words "vais" and "vêts"; laying down the first important issue of "staying" and "leaving", it is a movie that has a double opening, the second time when Antoine open the curtains.
"A work of art can't be a settling of old scores; if it is, the it's not a work of art." The flashback from the precedent movie expresses Truffaut's sentiments and objectives of reconciliation. And through Lucien's "the faults were not entirely theirs" Antoine's incessant run and search of the motherly love can stop; he recognizes her love and the "strange way of showing it".
The "settling" is omnipresent, starting from the beginning with Doinel's Les Salades de l'Amour, interrupting once again the opening of the movie, summarizing the nineteen volumes, seems to underline the importance of this number, and auto-portraying himself in the same time: "Herein lies proof of the poor guy's trouble with women" and his mother's love. Criticizing himself in summarizing gradually with the flashbacks proving again that "the faults were not entirely theirs".
The theme of childhood and reconciliation is also shown through Colette and the Draguignan law-case where she has to defend a man that killed his son, and the fact that she chooses to defend him in spite of the death of her own child, an element that expresses the theme of forgiveness.
In the past Doinel is considered to be self-centered and "egoist", as Colette calls him and Christine before her. The past movies were all about him; here through Colette's narrative the spectator is driven away from Doinel to her own life; although one can recognize in the Draguignan law-case, the similarities between Charles and Antoine: in their marital life; between the murderer and Antoine: the killing of persons (the kid and the consideration of killing the protagonist). The similarities in the speech with Xavier especially when he declares: "I never sell books with the word "Love" in the title".
On must also not the importance of the theme of death, in Colette's law-case and her child as we have seen above. But also in the case of the kid in the train, that is saved at the last moment. And even with the murderer in the cinema, in the movie. One can draw two parallels with Doinel's protagonist, and Truffaut's Doinel; commonly, the three kids that had lack of attention of their parents.
Literature transforms his "true" experiences, like with Balzac in the 400 Blows, Antoine rewrites and reassembles, like in the torn pieces of the picture, his life in short stories in juxtaposed and unordered flashbacks until the last disturbance of the fast moving camera of the last scene, mixed with the 400 Blows. Insisting on the common ground like the handkerchief; or the fact that Sabine kisses him in the cinema while a boxing match is projected, in opposition to the other scene with Christine. Ruptures become reconciliation, like his mother's lover and him in front of her tomb in opposition to the first time Antoine has seen them together. This movie is summarizing, puzzling and suggests a positive "fuite" rather than a closed clear ending, because as they says it themselves in front of the mirror, "we can't be certain it will last".
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