François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

9. The Child King: Small Change (1976), Love on the Run (1979)

235 Small Change and Love on the Run, in very different ways, both deal with the past, reassembling fragments of a childhood, a time of life, an experience. Of the sketches that make up Small Change, only the final one (the summer camp) is directly autobiographical. The othersaresnippetsofstoriesfoundinnewspapers,invented,orborrowed from others. Nevertheless, this film seems in many respects to be like a rereading of The 400 Blows, with all the young heroes being a composite ofAntoineDoinel.Love on the Run picksupthestoryofAntoinethrough flashbacks of the series that bears his name, and also of Day for Night, The Man Who Loved Women, and even A Gorgeous Girl Like Me. Small Change disperses memory across the space of a town that owes more to one of Trenet’s songs than to the actual reality of France in 1976; Love on the Run looks for images of a lost time in the memory of cinema, in this way definitively consummating the divorce between myth and life. Both films reflect a wish to exorcize the past by subjecting it to the gaze of an appeased maturity. The way they are edited transforms the story into a puzzle in which the key piece is that of inscribing a new vision of the relationship between the son and his mother. Small Change (1976) Whenever Truffaut speaks of his two passions, cinema and childhood, aerial metaphors come into his mind. To those who asked him whether he was worried about demythologizing the craft that he loved so much by making Day for Night, he replied: “An aviator can fully explain evThe Child King Small Change (1976) Love on the Run (1979) 236 François Truffaut: The Lost Secret erything that he knows about flying a plane, but he never succeeds in demythologizing the intoxication of flight.”1 Describing his work with children in Small Change, he compares it to shooting a scene from a helicopter: “You think a lot of time is going to be wasted by doing that. But as soon as the camera is in the helicopter, one gains an immense amount of time. Thirty kilometers can be filmed in ten minutes.”2 Small Change, like Day for Night, adopts a narrative organization that reflects a bird’s-eye view of reality. Polyphonic and collective, the story simultaneously encompasses a multiplicity of settings, actions, and characters. Childhood and cinema reassemble and accelerate life. Small Change is a film that also displays a slightly exhilarated perspective on things. It is delirious, but in such a deliberate way that when the teacher claims the right to vote for children in his speech, the message is delivered like a letter through the mail. We are entirely in the realm of fairy stories; children have seized power. In this fantastical town in which “Monsieur Sequin’s aftershave” is sold, people immediately construct a pulley to send food to a little girl who says from her window that she is hungry, a baby survives a fall from the tenth story without hurting himself, a son supplies provisions for his paralyzed father who lives surrounded by extraordinary machines for turning pages and making telephone calls, and cruel mothers with long hair live in strange huts built in the middle of trees. In the opening, Martine, a little girl, sends a postcard to her cousin Raoul from Bruère-Allichamps, in the center of France. The approval of her father–played by Truffaut–ensures from the outset that childhood is going to enjoy the protection of narrative authority. In contrast to the beginning of The 400 Blows, no prohibition is going to intercept and stifle freedom of expression and the relationship between the feminine and the masculine. The teacher confiscates the postcard that little Raoul is looking at in class, but instead of chastising him, he seizes the opportunity to turn the event into a geography lesson. Antoine’s fateful pin-up is replaced by the instructive message of a girl who is the same age as the pupils. The lesson is interrupted by the arrival of the teacher’s wife, who is pregnant. She calls her husband out into the corridor, and they embrace one another behind a glass door, which allows the children to observe this comforting vision of marital happiness. This model im- The Child King 237 planted in the beginning of the story licenses the formation of a young “couple” exchanging their first kiss at the...