Jean-Pierre Léaud's Anachronism: The Crisis of Masculinity in Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain

Jean-Pierre Léaud's Anachronism: The Crisis of Masculinity in Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain Susan Weiner IT IS A TELLING FACT of the on-screen life of actor Jean-Pierre Léaud that La Maman et la putain, one of the key French films of the 1970s, was written for him—and that it would become the role of his career.1 By the 1970s, Léaud's distinctive persona was firmly in place, largely as an amalgam of his performances for two of the lions of the New Wave, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. From his debut at the age of 15 as Antoine Doinel, the protagonist of Truffaut's 400 coups (1959), Léaud continued to play the role of Doinel in four subsequent films in which Truffaut created a life trajectory for the character: first love, military service, employment, marriage, fatherhood , infidelity, divorce, and authorship.2 All fairly ordinary stages, memorable here for die ingloriousness of their execution. For while Antoine goes through all the motions, he never fully assumes the socially required attitudes of manhood. Is it daily life in Fifth Republic society that is ridiculous, or Antoine Doinel himself? Antoine is egregiously, comically ill-suited to the meaningless occupations available to him: record factory worker, soldier, undercover shoe salesman, manipulator of electric toy boats for an American marina developer, dyer of white carnations. His culture and wit belie his circumstances ^—yet never does he protest his lot. Quirky and detached in his romantic involvements as well, he chooses girlfriends and then a wife because he is smitten with the parents. Antoine participates in the working world, in the life of the couple and the family, without ever truly belonging to them. The complex nature of this sort of outsiderdom, alternately endearing, exasperating, and pathetic, is rendered visible through Léaud's performance, through a gaze and a way of moving that communicate the intense inner life of Antoine Doinel underneath the social mediocrity. Shortly after Truffaut began to spin die Doinel cycle and in a different register , Godard repeatedly cast Léaud as a revolutionary and non-conformist. These were years when Godard dismissed Truffaut and his films as bourgeois, and Léaud became a rare point of contact between the former friends and collaborators . Léaud's work with Godard was ostensibly a way out of the Doinel persona. But despite the esthetic and political differences between the two Vol. XLII, No. 1 41 L'Esprit Créateur filmmakers, Godard's Léaud is strikingly reminiscent of Truffaut's Antoine Doinel.3 What might a character called Saint-Just (Weekend, 1967) have in common with the seemingly submissive Doinel? Léaud's performances provide the answer: both die radical and the conformist are social roles that the individual takes on, most often unconsciously. The characters Léaud played for Truffaut and Godard, on the other hand, remain aware of the theatrical nature of their social existence. As such, they are always at a remove from their words and deeds, whether acting as Maoist (La Chinoise, 1967), Marxist (Masculin/féminin, 1966), or Antoine Doinel. The cracks show; their fate is disappointment, if not failure, in life and love. Truffaut recognized in the young Léaud the potential to play the man who was himself playing a role and whose performance was far from seamless, a type mat resonated with him personally.4 Truffaut considered himself to be a nostalgic, ill-fitted for the modern world, and Léaud to be a kindred spirit who could bring that feeling of malaise to the screen. As he wrote in the introduction to the collected screenplays of the cycle, "Jean-Pierre m'intéresse justement par son anachronisme et son romantisme, il est un jeune homme du XIXe siècle" (Truffaut 8). It was an evocative characterization. Indeed, a spectator's reaction to Léaud/Doinel and to the youthful ideologues Léaud played for Godard will be in direct proportion to her or his taste or (in)tolerance for what Margaret Waller has so aptly termed the "mal(e) du siècle": the solipsistically sensitive young male protagonist of...