Mise en scene

Given how personal Francois Truffaut’s cinema was, from his autobiographical “400 Blows” through his intimate “Day for Night,” cinephiles assume they know the French filmmaker. But Truffaut was a secretive man, and it is only in reading the new biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana that one realizes how Truffaut’s life was even more dramatic than his movies.

The authors, who are editors at the French periodical Cahiers du Cinema (where Truffaut was a star critic in the 1950s), spare no detail in this comprehensive, weighty and engrossing study of a complex artist. More than 1,000 footnotes attest to meticulous research in previously private archives. They chronicle the brief but intense life of Truffaut, who barely survived infancy--and later juvenile delinquency--to become the most impudent film critic, the most celebrated French director and the most ardent lover of actresses, until his death at 52 from a brain tumor.

Much of the material in the book overlaps with the documentary film “Francois Truffaut: Stolen Portraits,” co-directed by Toubiana and Michel Pascal in 1993. But this biography--the first, despite numerous critical studies of the director’s work--allows for a leisurely and compelling accretion of detail.

If “The 400 Blows” told the unsentimental but gripping tale of an unwanted adolescent and petty thief--while launching the career of Jean-Pierre Leaud, its young star--”Truffaut: A Biography” shows just how personal Truffaut’s first feature was. Born to an unwed 19-year-old, he was raised by his grandmother till the age of 10.

“For Truffaut, school, instead of being educational, was an environment for fabricating lies,” the authors propose (in the excellent translation by Catherine Temerson). “If classes had to be cut in order to read Balzac or Dumas, if playing hooky was required in order to experience real life. . . .

“Hence the well-known reply he came up with in the fall of 1944 when he had to justify a recent absence, a reply that as a filmmaker he would put in the mouth of his screen hero Antoine Doinel 15 years later: ‘It’s my mother, sir. . . . She died.’ ” His step-father turned the young thief over to the police when he was 16, leading to incarcerations memorably recreated in “The 400 Blows.”

Biological ties remained problematic for Truffaut: shunned by his mother and aware that Roland Truffaut was a reluctant if good-natured stepfather, he created alternative family relationships. The great critic Andre Bazin became his “adoptive” father, just as a decade later, Truffaut brought up Jean-Pierre Leaud. (He was also a loving father to his daughters Laura and Eva.) Although he had no siblings, the director found in New Yorker Helen Scott a kind of sister, a confidant to whom he revealed secrets in letters that now form the basis of the biography’s revelations.

As far as his biological father is concerned, Truffaut used the same detective agency that served as consultant for his “Stolen Kisses” to find the man his mother never mentioned. He thus learned in 1968 that his father was a Jewish dental surgeon still living in Belfort, France. He traveled there, waited before Roland Levy’s house and finally saw the elderly gentleman.

“But just then Truffaut turned away,” the authors write. “He felt he couldn’t disrupt a man’s habits with the sudden revelation that he was his son. That night, he took a room in town and isolated himself in a movie house where they were showing Chaplin’s ‘Gold Rush.’ ”

Ultimately, men were less important to Truffaut than women. De Baecque and Toubiana portray a shy and anxious seducer who began a very active sex life at age 14. Even during his marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern--who would remain his closest friend until Truffaut’s death in 1984--love affairs continued.

The history of cinema is filled with the magic that transpires when the amorous gaze of a director is cast upon a talented actress. But if examples like Fellini / Giulietta Massina or Cassavetes / Gena Rowlands come to mind, with Truffaut the love was multiplied across a spectrum of his female stars.

He was enamored of Marie-France Pisier (“Antoine and Colette”), Jeanne Moreau (“Jules and Jim”), Francoise Dorleac (“The Soft Skin”), her sister Catherine Deneuve (“Mississippi Mermaid”), Julie Christie (“Fahrenheit 451”), Claude Jade (“Stolen Kisses”), Kika Markham (“Two English Girls”), Jacqueline Bisset (“Day for Night”), Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adele H.”) and finally Fanny Ardant (“The Woman Next Door”) with whom he had a daughter, Josephine.

The most remarkable thing about this diminutive practitioner of dangerous liaisons is that he maintained deep ties to most of these women long after the erotic relationships were over--and, in many cases, after suffering depression from the break-up. (According to the authors, he had to be hospitalized for a sleep cure following the separation from Deneuve. Nevertheless, this did not stop Truffaut from giving the actress one of her most magnificent parts 10 years later in “The Last Metro.”)

Like his hero in “The Man Who Loved Women,” Truffaut was an obsessive chronicler--and not only of his love affairs. Beginning in childhood, he kept a journal in which he noted the three films per day and three books per week that he devoured. This led, after imprisonment for desertion from the army, to a career writing about film in the 1950s.

Truffaut was the most belligerent critic of his time, “the grave-digger” of established French cinema while extolling the virtues of American movies. But once the frustrated cinephile became a cineaste, generosity replaced vitriolic attack.

De Baecque and Toubiana do a superb job situating the avowedly apolitical Truffaut in the ideological currents of his time, reminding us that “he always rallied to the cause of freedom of expression against a government that he saw as clumsy, interventionist, censorial, and tactless.”

Rebelling against academicism and left-wing intellectualism of the 1950s, he was considered part of the literary right. But when he signed a leftist manifesto in 1960 against the Algerian War, he was hounded in a way that recalls the blacklist in the United States.

The only overtly political actions of his life were in 1968, mobilizing to keep Henri Langlois as head of the Cinematheque Francaise when the government tried to oust him, and holding the curtain closed during the Cannes Film Festival in a show of solidarity with the rest of striking France.

Fighting the police alongside Truffaut in Cannes was Jean-Luc Godard, an ally since the Cahiers du Cinema days. But the biography makes clear that this was their last hurrah together, as Godard grew contemptuous of Truffaut’s commercial success.

Quoting from the vituperative letter he sent Truffaut--who had written the original treatment of “Breathless,” Godard’s first feature--and from Truffaut’s violent response, they reveal the acrimony that separated the former revolutionaries of the New Wave.

Through access to such documents--as well as to Truffaut’s family and collaborators for interviews--de Baecque and Toubiana have written a riveting and revelatory biography.