“François Truffaut, My Life, a Screenplay” – a deeply moving portrait of a genius

Depicting Truffaut through Truffaut’s own material - a combination of archive footage, letters, and an autobiographical account by the filmmaker himself - the film is the deeply moving portrait of a genius filmmaker who died much before his time

Teboul’s film draws on archive footage – some known, some unknown – interviews with Truffaut, his correspondence with his (adoptive) father, and above all an autobiographical account undertaken a few months before his death in 1984. It’s heartbreaking: The 400 Blows was a watered-down version of a wasted, uninvested childhood. Truffaut was disliked, even beaten at times.

Another moving passage: the words he pronounces at the end of his life, when he asked the professor treating him not to cure him, but to keep him alive long enough so that he could see the unborn child that Fanny Ardant was carrying – which did happen. We rediscover what we already knew: Truffaut was both an anguished and very funny man. But if we were to retain just one good point of this film, it would be that it makes us want to see Truffaut’s films again on the big screen. The beauty of the extracts that illustrate Teboul’s film is beyond measure.