The Instant Expert's Guide to François Truffaut

Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert guides introduce users to the major screen artists and the films on which their reputations rest. The series has already reached a baker's dozen and the next director under the spotlight is François Truffaut, the firebrand critic who taught himself to make pictures and spearheaded one of the most important creative movements in the history of cinema, the nouvelle vague.

Few film-makers, if any, have been able to match François Truffaut's passion for cinema. He once claimed to prefer the reflection of life to reality itself and famously stopped his car to eject a hitchhiker who had had the temerity to admit to disliking movies. Yet, despite striving to watch three pictures a day, Truffaut averred that 'film lovers are sick people' because they seek satisfaction by escaping from the everyday rather than embracing it.

As both critic and creator, Truffaut helped transform the medium and his influence remains strong almost four decades after his tragically early death. So, why not revisit an old favourite or venture into the unknown by sampling a film by a director who numbers Woody Allen, Patrice Leconte, Alexander Payne, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Noah Baumbach among his many admirers?

A Natural Born Survivor

The short, troubled life of François Roland Truffaut began on 6 February 1932 in Paris. His biological father was probably Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. But mother Janine de Montferrand left the space blank on her son's birth certificate and hurriedly married Roland Truffaut, who agreed to give the child his name. The secrecy probably saved François from deportation during the Nazi Occupation, but he knew nothing of his possible ancestry until a private detective presented his findings in 1968.

He knew he wasn't wanted, however, as, following the death of another infant, Janine sent François to live with her mother. She instilled the love of books and music that afforded some solace. But, on her death, the eight year-old returned to wartime Pigalle, where he palled up with Robert Lachenay, with whom he would frequently sneak into movie theatres after being enchanted by the first film he ever saw, Abel Gance's Paradise Lost (1939).

Entirely neglected at home, Truffaut found school rules impossible to obey and, having twice been expelled by the age of 14, he decided to follow a regime of watching three films a day and reading three books a week. From December 1944, his favourite haunt was Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, where he saw films from around the world, including the dozens of American features that had been withheld during the Occupation. In 1948, he took a job in a grocery store in order to launch his own Sunday film club, Cercle cinémanie. But cash flow problems prompted him to steal a typewriter from his stepfather's office and Truffaut would famously recreate the crime in his debut feature.

As his screenings clashed with those of the Travail et Culture club, Truffaut asked organiser André Bazin to reschedule. However, the 30 year-old critic of Le Parisien libéré took an instant shine to the teenager, who got to know nascent cinephiles like Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Alexandre Astruc at the newspaper's offices. Moreover, Bazin bailed Truffaut from the reformatory at Villejuif after Roland had charged him with breach of contract after he had continued with Cercle cinémanie after agreeing to close the club in return for having its debts paid. He was billeted in a religious household in Versailles, but was evicted after six months and it came as a relief to all concerned when Truffaut came of age and accepted a job as Bazin's assistant.

During this period, Truffaut discovered the highbrow Objectif 49 film society, where he befriended Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Suzanne Schiffman, who would later become his most trusted collaborator. Each Thursday, the cabal would descend upon the Ciné club du Quartier Latin, which was organised by Éric Rohmer, who also edited the society newsletter. In the spring of 1950, he offered Truffaut the chance to review Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939), which had been out of circulation since the outbreak of the war.

He was soon writing for Elle magazine, as well as Ciné-digest, Lettres du monde and France-dimanche. But trouble had a habit of finding the 18 year-old, who took the reckless decision to volunteer for the French Army after being jilted by Liliane Romano. He soon realised the folly of his action and, dreading the prospect of being sent to Indo-China, started lobbying to secure his exit. When he failed to talk his way out, Truffaut deserted and was incarcerated in a military prison. Fortunately, the psychologist who had identified his 'instability of character' contacted Bazin, who agreed to offer Truffaut lodgings at his Bry-sur-Marne home and keep him busy as a freelance writer.

The Gravedigger of French Cinema

Following a brief stint with the Ministry of Agriculture's film unit, Truffaut found a home at Cahiers du cinéma, which Bazin had founded in 1951 with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. Writing with a mix of passion and pugnacity, Truffaut became a fearless and fearsome critic, whose ability to make or break movies at the box office led to him becoming known as 'the gravedigger of French cinema'.

His first review was of David Miller's Joan Crawford vehicle, Sudden Fear (1952). But it was an article published in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers that not only made Truffaut's reputation, but also transformed academic approaches to film studies. Tearing into the domestic industry's dependence upon highly paid screenwriters intent on creating psychological realism, 'Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français' ('A Certain Tendency of French Cinema') singled out writers like Jacques Sigurd, Henri Jeanson, Robert Scipion, Roland Laudenbach and the popular team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost and blamed them for turning such once-capable directors as Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Delannoy, René Clément, Yves Allégret and Marcello Pagliero into makers of pretty pictures.

He also encouraged emerging talents like Ralph Habib, Andre Tabet, Jacques Companeez, Jean Guitton, Pierre Very, Jean Laviron, Yves Ciampi and Gilles Grangier to eschew this 'Tradition of Quality' (a term that had been coined by Jean-Pierre Barrot in L'Écran français) and follow the example of directors like Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophals, Jacques Tati, Henri-Georges Clouzot, André Cayatte and Roger Leenhardt who recognised the hegemony of imagery over dialogue.

Truffaut also lauded the way these chosen few imposed their personalities upon their material and he returned to their readiness to use the camera like a pen in developing Bazin's 'la politique des auteurs' (or 'auteur theory') in articles for Cahiers and the right-leaning Arts-Lettres-Spectacles in order to divide film-makers into 'auteurs', who employed leitmotific themes and visual traits, and 'metteurs-en-scène', who simply pointed the camera at speechifying actors. In his writings, Truffaut established a pantheon of worthies that included the aforementioned French directors, as well as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini, for whom Truffaut had worked as an assistant in 1955.

Essentially, Truffaut wanted film-makers to make art that reflected life rather than entertainment that offered an escape from it. But he was also prepared to put his money where his mouth was and made his directorial debut with the 1955 short, Une Visite, which boasted Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette as crew members. The following year, he started work on a screenplay about a small-time crook named Michel Portail, who had made headlines after shooting a motorcycle cop. He enlisted the help of close friend Jean-Luc Godard, who kept the idea in mind after Truffaut had moved on to make Les Mistons (1957) and Une Histoire d'eau (1958), which made evocative use of flooding on the outskirts of Paris.

Full of youthful joie de vivre, Les Mistons showed a group of mischief makers tearing down a poster for Jean Delannoy's Chiens perdus sans collier (1955), which was scripted by Aurenche and Bost and starred the iconic Jean Gabin. It proved to be a symbolic act of rebellion, as Truffaut was ready to produce a feature for his new company, Les Films du Carrosse, which had the backing of new wife Madeleine Morgenstern's father, who just happened to run Cocinor, one of France's biggest distribution agencies, which had made a small fortune after Truffaut had advised them to import Mikhail Kalatozov's poignant Soviet war drama, The Cranes Are Flying (1957).

A Nouvelle Vague Love/Hate Story

Inspired by a screening of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Truffaut joined forces with documentarist Marcel Moussy to write his first feature. Drawing on his own childhood, he followed the fortunes of Antoine Doinel, a 14 year-old who keeps bouncing back no matter how many times he's knocked down. Casting Jean-Pierre Léaud proved to be a masterstroke, as The 400 Blows (1959) would launch what became known as the Doinel Cycle', in which Truffaut used his alter ego over the next two decades to examine his own foibles and experiences. Closing with a celebrated freeze frame of the boy on the beach, the picture took the Cannes Film Festival by storm and not only landed the enfant terrible critic the Best Director award, but also earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Almost overnight, Truffaut and his iconoclastic approach to screen storytelling began impacting upon global cinema. Jean Cocteau declared, 'I have never been so moved in the cinema', while Claude Chabrol claimed The 400 Blows was the best first film in history, even surpassing Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). But not everyone was impressed, with critic Pierre Billard using the term 'nouvelle vague' pejoratively in dismissing convention-thumbing works like Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman... (1956), which had made a star of Brigitte Bardot, Louis Malle's Lift to the Scaffold and The Lovers, and Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (all 1958).

In fact, what Truffaut insisted was a quality rather than a like-minded group or a stylistic movement had first emerged in Agnès Varda's La Pointe courte (1954) and would recur in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1958) before Godard made his own splash with À Bout de Souffle (1960), which revived the Portail idea and earned Truffaut a writing credit. As Emmanuel Laurent's explains in his revealing documentary, Two in the Wave (2010), Truffaut and Godard had gone from Cahiers to Cannes in two short years and, in the process, they had turned the film world upside down. As the new decade began, the French release schedule was dominated by first-timers and their jump cuts, non-linear narratives, self-reflexive references, literary allusions and in-jokes were emulated in new waves across Europe and Latin America.

But the leaders of the pack came from very different backgrounds and were soon heading in opposite directions. As New Yorker scribe Richard Brody aptly put it, 'Truffaut was an outsider trying to break in; Godard was an insider trying to break out.' Moreover, the critics who had put them on a pedestal couldn't wait to knock them down and both Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist (1960) and Godard's Une Femmes est une femme (1961) were given a rough ride in the press. Both films have since been feted, but the nouvelle vague bubble burst very quickly, even as the likes of Chabrol's Les Cousins (1959), Resnais's Last Year At Marienbad, Jacques Rivette's Paris nous appartient (both 1961) and Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybèle (1962), among others, were creating excitement wherever they were shown.

To gauge the impact of the French New Wave, check out Bertrand Tavernier's deeply personal and utterly compelling A Journey Through French Cinema (2016). But Two in the Wave is even more insightful in its chronicle of the deteriorating relationship between Truffaut and Godard which started to fracture in December 1962, when the former claimed that the latter's incessant experimentation was driving audiences away from French cinemas. Not that he was exactly setting tills ringing, however, as Jules et Jim (1961) failed to find an audience, even though it is now regarded as a masterpiece. Indeed, Truffaut was so stung by the public reaction that he turned down the invitation to direct Bonnie and Clyde in California (Arthur Penn would eventually take the reins in 1967 after Godard had also declined) and took time out from film-making to devote three years to interviewing Alfred Hitchcock and transcribing the resulting tapes for a book that would, as Kent Jones reveals in Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), help revise opinions of the Master of Suspense from being a hired Hollywood hand into becoming a revered artist.

While Truffaut was toiling over his tome, Godard made eight features and became the darling of the Cinémathèque, which had moved from the Avenue de Messine to larger premises on the Rue d'Ulm. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Godard's La Chinoise (1967) stressed the political gulf that was also opening up between the erstwhile inseparables. Yet they found themselves on the same side when Charles De Gaulle's government attempted to ban Rivette's adaptation of Denis Diderot's The Nun (1966), which starred Godard's Danish wife, Anna Karina. They also manned the barricades at the Cinémathèque when culture minister André Malraux fired Henri Langlois in February 1968 and the pair gleaned the support of such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Gance, Renoir, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Bresson and Nicholas Ray in having him reinstated.

However, Truffaut was markedly less militant than Godard and his unease at cancelling Cannes in support of the Soixant-huitards protesting across France in May 1968 turned to defiance when he refused to disrupt the Avignon festival and Godard branded him 'a traitor' for taking the side of working-class gendarmes over the bourgeois revolutionaries. As if to rub his Marxist credentials in Truffaut's face, Godard started making films with Jean-Pierre Gorin under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group. Several of these are available from Cinema Paradiso, including Tout va bien (1972), which teamed Yves Montand and Jane Fonda.

But it was Truffaut's Oscar-winning insight into the film-making process, Day For Night (1973), that sparked the final falling out, with Truffaut responding to Godard's sneering four-page denunciation with a 20-page missive in which he accused the Swiss of being 'both jealous and envious' before fuming, 'You're the Ursula Andress of militancy - you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.'

Despite still having business connections, relations were frosty from thenceforth, with Godard telling Télérama in 1978, 'I think that François absolutely doesn't know how to make films. He made one that truly corresponded to him, and then it stopped there: afterward, he only told stories.' He went on, 'Truffaut is a crook who passes himself off as an honest man, which is the worst thing.' Yet it was Godard who extended the occasional olive branch and their rejection perhaps prompted him to aver in his memorial notice in Cahiers that Truffaut the film-maker had betrayed the high ideals of Truffaut the critic.

Four years after Truffaut's death, Godard wrote a foreword to a collection of correspondence, in which he regretted their quarrel, while he paid tribute to his old friend in his epic essay, Histoire (s) du cinéma (1989). Something about being a nouvelle vaguer continued to rile Godard, however, and he deeply upset one of his oldest acquaintances by failing to keep an appointment on camera in Varda By Agnès (2019), which turned out to be the 90 year-old's final feature.

An Auteur Adrift

In 1961, Truffaut was sued for defamation by Roger Vadim after he wrote in France-observateur that Bardot's husband had hijacked Jean Aurel's film, La Bride sur le cou. He lost the case and a number of supporters, who felt he had abused his position. The already fragmenting nouvelle vague never recovered its sense of united purpose, while Truffaut's home life was undermined by his romance with actress Liliane Davide, which provided the inspiration for The Soft Skin (1964), in which intellectual Jean Desailly's marriage to Nelly Bendetti comes under strain after he falls for air hostess Françoise Dorléac.

Truffaut made the film hurriedly after the starting date for his adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) was delayed. Set in a future in which firemen set light to books to control the ideas reaching the population, this was not only Truffaut's first film in colour, but also his sole outing in English (a language he barely understood, let alone spoke). Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg created some stunning imagery, but the production suffered when Truffaut fell out with Jules et Jim star Oskar Werner, who had been cast as Montag ahead of Charles Aznavour and Jean-Paul Belmondo, despite Universal hoping to snare Paul Newman, Peter O'Toole, Montgomery Clift or Terence Stamp.

Julie Christie landed the dual role of Montag's wife and teacher Clarisse ahead of Jean Seberg, Tippi Hedren and Jane Fonda, while Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and Sterling Hayden were pipped to the part of the fire captain by Cyril Cusack. Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon and Sofia Boutella headlined Ramin Bahrani's 2018 remake of Fahrenheit 451, but this proved as much of a critical and commercial disappointment as its predecessor. Yet each film has its merits and would make a fascinating Cinema Paradiso double bill.

Returning to the world of hard-boiled pulp, Truffaut went into Hitchcock mode to adapt Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black (1967), which follows Jeanne Moreau's bid to wreak revenge on the men responsible for her groom's murder on the church steps. Despite having worked on five Truffaut pictures, cinematographer Raoul Coutard found himself at odds with the director for much of the shoot and Moreau frequently had to mediate. Yet, while the Golden Globe-nominated thriller only met with a modest response on its release, it proved a significant influence on both Jess Franco's She Killed In Ecstasy (1970) and Rajkumar Kohli's Nagin (1976). The passing similarity to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol.1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004) turned out to be pure coincidence, however, as Tarantino insisted he had not seen Truffaut's feature when he made his own.

Despite his passion for the moving image, Truffaut's insistence that a film should reflect its maker's concerns and personality made him a reluctant producer. He helped friends Claude Jutra (Anna la Bonne, 1958) and Robert Lachenay (Le Scarabée d'Or, 1961) complete early outings and later sponsored Renaud Victor's documentary, Ce Gamin, là (1976). But, having served as an uncredited associate producer on Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus (1959) and helped Claude de Givray complete The Army Game (1960), Truffaut's only other credit as a producer outside his own oeuvre was Maurice Pialat's debut feature, L'Enfance nue (1968), an unflinching companion piece to The 400 Blows that follows 10 year-old François (Michel Terrazon), as he deals with the trauma of being a foster child after having been abandoned by his mother.

Having dropped in on Antoine Doinel and his new love (Marie-France Pisier) in the 'Antoine and Colette' episode of the 1962 anthology picture, Love At Twenty, Truffaut caught up with his progress once more in Stolen Kisses (1968). Freshly demobbed from the army, Antoine (still played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) seeks to impress violinist Christine Darbon (Claude Jade). But he finds it impossible to hold down a job and, while masquerading as a shoe shop stock clerk while working as a private eye, he allows himself to be seduced by the boss's wife, Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig). Nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the project was notable for the fact that Truffaut once again fell in love with his leading lady, who made her American bow in Hitchcock's Cold War saga, Topaz (1969).

The engagement to Jade didn't last long, however, as Truffaut lost his heart again while working with Catherine Deneuve on Mississippi Mermaid (1969). He had romanced her sister, Françoise Dorléac, while shooting Soft Skin. But he and Deneuve remained an item for three years, even though they didn't work together for another 11 after this adaptation of Waltz into Darkness, which Cornell Woolrich had written under the name William Irish. Playing the Gallic equivalent of a Hitchcockian blonde, Deneuve dupes Réunion Island tobacco planter Jean-Paul Belmondo into believing she's his mail-order bride. Yet, even though this dark fairytale isn't regarded as one of Truffaut's best films, it's still superior to Michael Cristofer's remake, Original Sin (2001), which teamed Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas in 19th-century Cuba.

In His Element

In the early 1960s, Truffaut had hoped to make a film about deaf-blind seven year-old Helen Keller and her inspirational teacher, Annie Sullivan. But Arthur Penn had acquired the rights to William Gibson's play, The Miracle Worker, and it was not until Truffaut discovered Victor of Aveyron in Lucien Malson's book about abandoned children that he found a suitable alternative subject for The Wild Child (1970). Truffaut cast himself as Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, the 18th-century doctor at the National Institute For the Deaf and Dumb in Paris, who seeks to rehabilitate a young boy (Jean-Pierre Cargol) who had been found living a feral existence in the forest.

Truffaut dedicated the picture to Léaud, with whom he reunited on Bed and Board (1970), the fourth instalment of the Doinel saga. Antoine and Christine are now married and expecting a child. But, dyeing flowers in a tenement courtyard that resembles the one in Jean Renoir's The Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) proves too limiting a profession and Antoine finds himself falling for Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer) after he takes a job operating model boats for an American firm. Delightfully photographed by Néstor Almendros, the film is full of bittersweet humanist details that confirm Truffaut as the Marcel Proust of cinema. There's even the sweetest of tributes to Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot. However, Truffaut would leave the Doinels to their fate for the remainder of the decade, as he sought to reconcile his love of books with his antipathy for middlebrow adaptation.

In Anne and Muriel (aka Two English Girls, 1971), he returned to Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of Jules et Jim, for a celebration of the written word in books, newspapers and letters. Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter star as the sculpting and schoolteaching sisters whose fin-de-siècle Welsh summer with lothario Claude Roc ignites a 20-year ménage that takes them to Paris, Persia and into the depths of their souls. Working with Jean-Pierre Léaud for the first time on a non-Doinel feature, Truffaut was dissatisfied with the version released in cinemas and, shortly before his death, he restored around 20 minutes of footage to the current cut.

Having pondered the transience of romance and the pitfalls of matrimony, Truffaut changed tack with A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972), which was based on a novel by Henry Farrell and provides one of the few overtly negative depictions of womankind in the director's canon. At the heart of this screwball noir is Camille Bliss (Bernadette Lafont), who has been jailed for murdering her father and her lover. But besotted sociologist Stanislas Prévine (André Dussollier), who is making a study of female criminality, is determined to prove her innocence.

While this undervalued film performed well at the French box office, Truffaut's next venture saw him showered with plaudits, as Day For Night, his paean to the film-making process, earned him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It also brought nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Director, with Truffaut taking the latter award at the BAFTAs, along with Best Film. Dedicated to Dorothy and Lilian Gish, who had been key members of DW Griffith's ensemble in the early silent era, the picture also contained a cheeky cameo by novelist Graham Greene, who lived close to the Riviera set and appeared under the name Henry Graham as a prank on Truffaut, who failed to recognise him.

He returned to the period picture to earn his first César nomination with The Story of Adèle H. (1975), a biopic of Victor Hugo's daughter that was set in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1860s. At just 20, Isabelle Adjani became the youngest recipient of an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her touching interpretation of the headstrong heroine, who adopts the name of Lewly and moves into a humble boarding house in order to follow the love of her life, British officer Lieutenant Pinson. The latter was played by Bruce Robinson, who would go on to secure screen immortality as the director of Withnail and I (1987).

Truffaut stayed in a small-town frame of mind with Pocket Money (1976), which centres on Thiers teacher Jean-François Stévenin and the duty of care he feels towards the children in his class, particularly Geory Desmouceaux and Philippe Goldman, who respectively have a disabled father and an abusive mother. Revisiting the themes of childhood and education that were so close to his heart, Truffaut combined personal recollections with the anecdotes he had been squirreling away since The 400 Blows. As Paul Newman and Lee Marvin had teamed in a 1972 Stuart Rosenberg feature called Pocket Money, the US release title for this Golden Globe-nominated charmer was changed to Small Change, after a suggestion by Steven Spielberg.

He directed Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), after having considered Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Lino Ventura for the role of French scientist Claude Lacombe. While on the set, Truffaut wrote the screenplay for The Man Who Loved Women (1977), whose action flashes back from the funeral of Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), as book editor Geneviève Bigey (Brigitte Fossey) reflects on the compulsive womaniser's affairs with lingerie shop owner Hélène (Geneviève Fontanel), doctor's wife Delphine Grezel (Nelly Borgeaud) and old flame Véra (Leslie Caron).

Blake Edwards borrowed the title for his 1983 remake, with Burt Reynolds, Julie Andrews and Kim Basinger. But it wasn't a patch on Truffaut's original, which riffed on a line that Serge Davri had delivered in Shoot the Pianist: 'Woman is pure, delicate, fragile. Women are marvellous, women are supreme. For me women were always supreme,' Casting himself for the last time, Truffaut revisited this theme with Nathalie Baye in The Green Room (1978), a reflection on lost childhood that drew on Henry James's short story, 'The Altar of the Dead', to channel the pain Truffaut felt at losing close friends Henri Langlois and Roberto Rossellini into the story of a 1920s obituary writer who is obsessed with the memory of his late wife.

Gone Too Soon

Despite divorcing Madeleine Morgenstern in 1965, Truffaut remained close friends and often spent Sundays with her and their daughters, Laura and Eva. Neither remarried and Truffaut reflected on the pain of break up in Love on the Run (1979), which proved to be the final part of the Doinel saga. Strewn with clips from earlier episodes, it shows Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) hitting 30, as he is separated from Christine (Claude Jade) and having an affair with her friend, Liliane (Dani). However, a chance meeting with first love, Colette (Marie-France Pisier), while working on an autobiographical novel, persuades Antoine that he should settle down with new partner, Sabine (Dorothée).

Life would mirror art in the fact that Truffaut would fall in love with actress Fanny Ardant shortly after his reunion with old flame Catherine Deneuve on The Last Metro (1980). Drawing on childhood memories of the Occupation, this intense drama missed out on the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. But it scooped 10 Césars from a dozen nominations, with Truffaut completing a hat-trick as co-writer, co-producer and director. Easily his most political film, this celebration of creative courage also served as an apologia to those like Godard who had criticised Truffaut for not being more outspoken, as it suggested that art made with care and commitment could be every bit as powerful as soapbox sloganising.

Throughout his career, there had been the suggestion that Truffaut had used his films to ponder the problems of his personal life. The first of the two films to star Fanny Ardant (with whom he would have a third daughter, Joséphine), The Woman Next Door (1981), could easily have been a Doinel drama, as former lovers Bernard Coudray (Gérard Depardieu) and Mathilde Bauchard (Ardant) debate whether to jeopardise contented marriages by embarking upon a torrid affair when they discover they are Grenoble neighbours.

Adultery also rears its head in what turned out to be Truffaut's swan song. But the tone was more playful in Finally, Sunday! (1983), which took Charles Williams's novel, The Long Saturday Night, as the inspiration for a teasingly noirish narrative that sees Provençal estate agent Jean-Louis Trintignant rely on secretary Fanny Ardant to get him out of a corner after his wife and her lover are murdered.

Sadly, Truffaut didn't get to enjoy his newfound happiness for long. Having suffered what appeared to be a minor stroke, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He wasn't told of the severity of his condition, however, and died at the age of 52 on 21 October 1984. Despite being an atheist, he requested a Catholic burial in the cemetery at Montmartre. Among the projects he left unrealised were La Petite voleuse, which Claude Miller made with Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1988, and Belle Époque, which Gavin Millar turned into a three-part mini-series about the 1900 Paris Exposition, which was narrated by Jeanne Moreau.