I love Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut to death, but they couldn’t have been more different as storytellers. Still, the two will forever be associated with one another because of Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book derived from the two filmmakers’ week-long encounter in Los Angeles, and this summer TIFF Cinematheque is using Kent Jones’s documentary about those interviews to launch a twinned retrospective showcasing the finest works of both directors.
As a dramatist, Hitchcock was cold and calculating, creating elaborate set pieces designed to render his audience as helpless as his heroes.
Think of Jimmy Stewart’s inability to warn Grace Kelly of Raymond Burr’s return in Rear Window (July 24), or Tippi Hedren going up into the attic in The Birds (August 20), or Janet Leigh getting into that shower in Psycho (July 19). Something horrible is about to happen, and we know it and can’t do a thing to stop it.
It’s a kind of weaponized empathy: we love these characters, we’re invested in them, and Hitchcock uses that investment against us. Sometimes, though, he just torments them for fun, as he does poor Cary Grant in North By Northwest (July 7).
Truffaut, by contrast, was a much warmer filmmaker. His movies are more often driven by their characters than their plots. His magnificent first feature, The 400 Blows (July 12) and the wonderful Jules And Jim (July 10) give us the feeling that we’re accompanying their protagonists through life rather than witnessing the progression of a narrative. Yes, but we’re also being set up to be blindsided by feelings.
Even his thrillers are playful, in love with the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Shoot The Piano Player (July 15) turns genre into jazz, and while both Mississippi Mermaid (July 23) and The Bride Wore Black (July 28) are played straight, there’s an undercurrent of pleasure in them that feels like Truffaut and his actors can’t believe they’re making the sort of movie they grew up watching.
But he could be serious when the material required it. The Wild Child (August 14) and The Story Of Adele H. (August 21), both based on true stories, are almost remote in their construction, letting us focus on their profound emotional stakes.
And then there’s Day For Night (July 8), in which Truffaut takes the old saw about a movie production being like a short-term family unit and runs with it, turning the set of a (fake) French drama into a carnival of colliding ambitions, neuroses and desires enacted by the likes of Jacqueline Bisset, Nathalie Baye, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Jean-Pierre Léaud (the young hero of The 400 Blows, mostly grown up at this point).
That’s Truffaut himself playing the director, by the way – and investing the role of beleaguered ringmaster with far more kindness, I suspect, than Hitchcock ever did.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
