François Truffaut

François Truffaut’s last film is a love letter from one great film lover to another, Alfred Hitchcock, and it comes in the shape of a film noir told with a light, almost teasing touch. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Fanny Ardant lead the cast. — The story, adapted from a Charles Williams novel, unfolds over a few days in a small town in the south of France. The head of an estate agency becomes the prime suspect when his wife and her lover are murdered, and as the evidence piles up and a third body appears, he goes into hiding. His secretary, meanwhile, decides to do some digging of her own. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | BAFTA Awards | 1984

The New Wave is at its freest, most passionate and most anarchic here, with Jeanne Moreau as the woman two friends go on loving for twenty years. Nothing about that arrangement is ever simple. — Jules is a shy Austrian writer and Jim a French intellectual, and in Paris around 1912 the two friends meet Catherine, a beautiful, passionate woman who does exactly as she likes. What follows is a love affair for three, until the war separates them. Jules and Catherine marry, and for a while all three remain friends, but the balance between them never quite holds. — Best Director | Mar del Plata Film Festival | 1962

Under the Occupation, every show had to end in time for the audience to catch the last metro before curfew. Truffaut pits artists against the Nazis as Catherine Deneuve keeps her theatre going while its Jewish director hides beneath the stage. The romance is straight out of “Casablanca”. — In Paris in 1942, a theatre in Montmartre casts a young man in the lead of its play, an actor who is also a member of the Resistance. His leading lady is the theatre’s owner, beautiful if not especially likeable, who is hiding her Jewish husband in the cellar beneath the stage. Opening night is a triumph, and then an antisemitic critic sets his sights on the show. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1981 Best Film | César Awards | 1981 Best Cinematography | César Awards | 1981

Through five films and twenty years, Antoine Doinel was François Truffaut’s alter ego, and this is where the two of them part. As moments from his past drift back, he’s still the man he always was, fighting for love, believing in it and forever looking for it. — Antoine Doinel is back one last time. His marriage weathered his first affair but has ended in divorce all the same, and now he works as a proofreader, has finally published his autobiographical novel and is falling for a woman who sells records. Then a train journey reunites him with Colette, his first love, and they spend it reading his book together. Both she and his ex-wife will prove crucial on his road to happiness. — Official Selection | Berlin International Film Festival | 1979 César Award Best Music | | 1980

Little Antoine Doinel from Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” has grown up, though being an adult is proving harder than he expected for a boy who never quite stopped being one. The result is a bittersweet melancholy that is often genuinely funny and, now and then, deeply touching. — Truffaut’s fourth film about Antoine Doinel, the boy from “The 400 Blows”, finds him married to the lovely Christine in a Paris apartment building where the neighbours know everyone’s business. He drifts between odd jobs, dyeing flowers and steering model ships around a pool, while Christine is expecting their first child. Then he meets Kyoko, a young Japanese woman, and the nights he comes home late start to add up.

Truffaut was still a boy when his own father handed him over to the police, and years later that memory became a film. Jean-Pierre Léaud, cast in the lead, never memorised his lines but spoke in his own words. Blow after blow, you feel how cruel childhood can be. — Antoine Doinel makes his first appearance as an unruly boy growing up in a cramped Paris flat with a family that doesn’t understand him. He skips school, steals and suffers under a teacher who has it in for him, until an arrest lands him in a cell overnight with prostitutes and thieves. The court sends him to a reform school, but Antoine escapes, in search of freedom. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1959 Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1959 OCIC Award | Cannes Film Festival | 1959

Truffaut was working on his book of interviews with Hitchcock while he made this film, and you can tell. A married man falls for an air hostess and convinces himself he has it all under control, and though it’s no thriller, the tension is thick enough to cut with a knife. — On a flight to Portugal, a well-known writer who edits a literary magazine meets a beautiful air hostess. When chance brings them together again at his hotel, an affair begins. The trouble is, he’s married. From then on his life is a run of stolen hours and out-of-town hotels, and his wife is starting to suspect something. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1964

Truffaut has never been lighter or funnier than in this next chapter of Antoine Doinel’s life, which is indecently charming and packed with nods to other films. It sings the praises of love affairs, the kind that send you soaring and then smash you to pieces. — Antoine is fresh out of the army in 1968 Paris and finding grown-up life hard going, both at work and in love. He takes a job as a private detective and falls madly for an older woman, the wife of a shoe shop owner. Not that he’s quite let go of Christine, his old girlfriend. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1969

After “The 400 Blows”, Truffaut continues the story of Antoine Doinel, with Jean-Pierre Léaud reprising the defining role of his career. This short film was shot as part of a 1962 anthology, yet it was but a small step in Antoine’s cinematic epic before he returned in three more Truffaut classics. — During a Berlioz concert, 17-year-old Antoine observes Colette, whose heart he wishes to conquer. The girl’s parents welcome him, but Colette sees him as nothing more but a good friend.

"With or without you". Truffault distillates in one phrase and one film the crazy erotic passion that leads cursed lovers Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu to a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster. — A couple with a young son lives happily in a village outside Grenoble. One day, a married couple moves next to them and, to the man’s surprise, his new neighbor is an old lover. Soon, the two former lovers secretly rekindle their relationship, until their lies can no longer be contained.