criterionforum.org

I don't recall Kael's review specifically but I believe she claimed Léaud was miscast, which entirely misses the point. He's so good at playing characters who appear at ease but with nescient passivity, a lack of self-consciousness that feels like a coping mechanism for a deficit in accessing his deeper self. Léaud is the perfect actor for this character who is unknowable to himself and to us, putting up walls of bland chivalry to hide any real identity. His vapid nature also helps us understand how Muriel's attraction is sourced in a fantasy rather than a love for his deeper self, or at least in a place that is clouded by other self-motivated desires. This is a film about three lonely people unable to express themselves, only partially because of social norms, but mostly because they don't have the skills to locate what they want to express.

My experience watching it five+ years ago was equally compelling, but more focused on an optimistic presentation of love's internal logic escaping these characters. I remember finding comfort in the perspective that we never know when mutual love will build in two people and how great it is that this can occur, and change, and we can discover new love in other places we were blind to before, an onion with infinite layers of opportunities to peel back. I still feel this way, but now as a man in my 30s, with a few more failed relationships under my belt and the same poisonous defective characteristics contributing to those failures, despite attending to continuous therapeutic work across multiple domains in an effort to change, yet still maintaining delusory ideals of what I think I want and can do in contrast to what transpires in reality, the tragic elements stood out to me this time. I believe in both lenses of approach, but felt far more compassion for the third wheel, the one who is doing all of the 'feeling', and how sad it is that this feeling dissipates when that person finally obtains the union they've sought for so long.

As an addendum to my completion of Truffaut's directorial filmography, I recently watched Mata Hari agent H.21 (Jean-Louis Richard 1964), which was conceived and co-written by Truffaut but passed off to his sometime collaborator Richard, presumably because Truffaut was nervous about directing another "non-serious" work after Tirez sur le pianiste bombed. The film is a transparent throwback to Hollywood war romance melodramas of decades prior, something which is blatantly obvious to everyone but Letterboxd members with no concept of film history. As a mainstream entertainment, it's very amusing-- and more entertaining, I'd say, than Truffaut and Richard's other film this year which Truffaut did direct. Not an amazing movie, but given the kinds of films Truffaut would race to direct in the coming years, an insightful peek at what he prioritized in his early years.

That does sound fun and at least the top letterboxd review seems to get it.

tenia wrote: Fri Oct 09, 2020 6:32 pm To be exact, the Arte Truffaut set has specs with duration calculated at 25 fps. There's no certainty yet it's because it'll really be 1080i50.
The specs however mention HD, 2k and 4k, and I'd suppose everything stating HD will be older pre existing masters.

I opened the box. These are the specs according to the backcover for each disc:
HD 1920 X 1080: La Mariée, La Sirène, Une Belle Fille, Adèle H
HD 2K: L'Enfant sauvage, L'Argent de poche, L'Homme qui aimait les femmes
HD 4K: La Chambre verte

I'm not a technical buff, so if anyone knows if the Kino and Radiance disc offer better, please let me know.

DVD Classik tested the French Arte set then : https://www.dvdclassik.com/test/blu-ray ... r-d-images

Only La chambre verte is in 1080p, but otherwise, it's indeed what you report in terms of sources.

Thanks for delivering the hard but necessary news tenia. I'm guess I'm getting the Kinos.

"In the extras of the Fahrenheit 451 DVD, Nic Roeg tells the story that they did the final cut & everyone was happy, but Truffaut said I'll just get my guy from Paris to come & see it, make sure he's ok with it. So this enigmatic guy turns up a few days later, says yeah it's great, but swap around Scene 1 & 2. Everyone says no way! Then they watch the re-cut & agree. In the end, you get to see the short-haired idealistic Christie before you see the drug-stupefied wife Christie ... so you see the hope before you see the melancholy home life Montag wishes to escape."

Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... lms-ranked

I finally got around to completing Truffaut's directorial filmography this weekend by watching the few remaining films of his that I had not yet seen, and it got me wondering what the current critical consensus on old François is, particularly in relation to Rivette, Rohmer, and Resnais. Being someone who doesn't follow film criticism or academic discussion of film, I have always viewed Truffaut as a one-hit wonder, which is rather convenient for various "greatest films of all time" type exercises, since you don't end up splitting votes among several films (though even Les quatre cents coups seems to be falling off ever so slightly in the Sight & Sound lists, going from tied-35th in 2002 to tied-39th in 2012 to tied-50th in 2022, if my information is correct). But perhaps I'm being unfair since it is true that Jules et Jim continues to hold on to a spot in the top 100 of the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They aggregate list (though its trajectory is also downward sloping, falling from 33rd in the first iteration of the list to 99th now). In any case, I find Truffaut to be a much less interesting filmmaker than any of the three R's mentioned previously, and I wonder to what extent my view aligns with the current critical consensus.

Well, Godard considered him a traitor to the cause, but he continued to have a reputation and enjoy commercial and critical success through the 80’s (Oscar nom for Last Metro), even if he became less distinctive. I imagine most filmmakers have a dip in generational popularity once they near 100.

GoodOldNeon wrote: Sun Oct 05, 2025 7:19 pm I finally got around to completing Truffaut's directorial filmography this weekend by watching the few remaining films of his that I had not yet seen, and it got me wondering what the current critical consensus on old François is, particularly in relation to Rivette, Rohmer, and Resnais. Being someone who doesn't follow film criticism or academic discussion of film, I have always viewed Truffaut as a one-hit wonder, which is rather convenient for various "greatest films of all time" type exercises, since you don't end up splitting votes among several films (though even Les quatre cents coups seems to be falling off ever so slightly in the Sight & Sound lists, going from tied-35th in 2002 to tied-39th in 2012 to tied-50th in 2022, if my information is correct). But perhaps I'm being unfair since it is true that Jules et Jim continues to hold on to a spot in the top 100 of the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They aggregate list (though its trajectory is also downward sloping, falling from 33rd in the first iteration of the list to 99th now). In any case, I find Truffaut to be a much less interesting filmmaker than any of the three R's mentioned previously, and I wonder to what extent my view aligns with the current critical consensus.

Coincidentally, I've been slowly going through the Truffaut discs in my collection (nearly everything besides the Doinel saga, Fahrenheit 451 and Day for Night) and I'm up to "The Man Who Loved Women". I can't say that watching his films have made me a fan. Most I outright disliked ("Jules and Jim", "A Goregous Girl Like Me" and "Two English Girls" specifically) or thought were simply okay/mediocre.

Les quatre cents coups and (regrettably) Le dernier métro at least are still staples of French classes in the US. I actually just taught the former in that context to a bunch of college freshman and sophomores last week, to a reasonably good response — it wasn’t my choice, though given how freaked out most of them were when I showed La cérémonie in my extra-credit film club last year, maybe I shouldn’t be given that power. Anecdotally, when I was living in France, Truffaut and Rohmer, were the main auteur names that non-cinephiles would ask me about when I told them I loved French cinema. When I said Godard was my favorite of the bunch, the response was almost always some sort of visceral revulsion. Still a Young Turk after all these years. Though the true horror, even among cinephiles, was when I said I loved the films and late novels of Marguerite Duras…

Back to Truffaut, I think it’s funny how in the 60s and 70s Godard came under fire for his sexual politics while Truffaut was painted as a gentle humanist. Today I’d say Godard’s work mostly holds up well under that lens (even before you get into the explicitly feminist films he made in the 70s with Anne-Marie Miéville), whereas it’s something of a stumbling block for new viewers of Truffaut. Feminine ideals and incel frustration are a pretty unpleasant combo. It’s poignant under the “Araby”-like portrait of youth in Antoine et Colette, but afterwards (Jules et Jim, Basiers volés) it’s rather more difficult to find charming — a friend in college was practically ready to break up with a guy when he told her his favorite movie was Jules et Jim.

Truffaut was actually my gateway to films outside of mainstream Hollywood films. I'm not sure what drew me to him in the first place - I recognized he was an actor in Close Encounters but I only mildly enjoyed that movie and it never meant that much to me, even as a kid. It might've been something as prosaic as me needing a book to read for my French class's book report assignment, and Truffaut par Truffaut seemed like something I could take on that wasn't too difficult to read. Regardless, I was hooked, and it sent me into other things, not just in cinema but even the Beatles (which I checked out because A Hard Day's Night was cited as one example of the French New Wave's enormous influence) which in turn led me to everything else in music. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Truffaut was profoundly life-changing for me, possibly more than any other filmmaker, but in fairness it all happened at an age when most people end up discovering the things that mean most to them.

For the record -- Les deux anglaises et le continent was cut by 20 mins. a few months after release. In 1984, Truffaut lengthened the film to 130 mins. It was released in 1985 as Deux Anglaises:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Deux_ ... _Continent
https://nfi.hu/en/budapest-classics-fil ... girls.html
https://www.dvdclassik.com/critique/les ... t-truffaut

restored in 4K:
https://www.cinemas-du-grutli.ch/films/ ... -continent

According to the Kino Insider, Universalno longer has the rights to Fahrenheit 451

Aren’t all of the Truffaut rights eventually going to mk2?

I don't think it has been confirmed to be the case for Fahrenheit 451 and Day for Night, but it is probably a safe assumption now that both are no longer with the US studios that had them.