François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

10. Fetishism and Mourning: The Man Who Loved Women (1977), The Green Room (1978)

251 Being imprisoned or dead, mothers were sidelined in Small Change and Love on the Run. The two films that frame them, however , The Man Who Loved Women and The Green Room, are among the films in Truffaut’s oeuvre that most powerfully and tragically address the problem of the relationship between the son and the mother, and the oppressive constraints that its failure imposes on the mature adult. They also represent, fairly explicitly, an allegorical projection of the very process of creation. As The 400 Blows announced, the maternal figure is inseparablefromculturalaccomplishments.TheManWhoLovedWomen and The Green Room explore the modalities of this interaction, which is underlain by a piercing anxiety about time and death. Whereas abundance and scarcity, anachronism and linear temporality, and the search for pleasure as against privation seem to be opposed to one another, we find a meticulous diptych that identifies a series of formal similarities. The triadic structure of these films includes a lonely man who has been shocked by death (Morane/Davenne), a woman who is destined to survive him (Geneviève, the editor/Cécilia the guardian of the temple), and an obsession1 (a multitude of living women/a single dead woman). An obsessive fear of the past also appears in the form of flashbacks and photos, narcissistic fusion with a female figure who has disappeared, the benevolent mediation of a male mentor (played in both cases by JeanDasté),behaviorsvergingonthepsychopathological,andespecially in the celebration of an object that is over-valued, a fetish and a relic, that impregnates these works with the aura of what Freud calls “the uncanny .”MauriceJaubert’smusicaccompaniesbothfilms,whichtogether Fetishism and Mourning The Man Who Loved Women (1977) The Green Room (1978) 252 François Truffaut: The Lost Secret complete, in an unconventional mode of black humor, the reflection on creative activity begun in Day for Night and The Last Metro. The Man Who Loved Women (1977) In The Man Who Loved Women, Truffaut weaves the strands of time together like the wickerwork of a basket. He was more preoccupied with the container in this instance than what it contained. Four temporalities intertwineinastorythattriestoremoveaman’slifefromtheconstraints of linear progression. The story begins and ends in 1976, at the cemetery in which Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) is being buried. It presents itself as a flashback that retraces the composition that the hero wrote in 1975, before his death. Images from the recent past, that is to say, ones that involve his pursuit of women, and well as images of his childhood, ruled over by his mother, come to be inserted in the present of the narration . When Bertrand thinks he has finished his book and reunited all the strands of his past, he meets a woman by chance, Véra, who has escaped from his written inventory despite her major role in the life of the hero. A fragment of forgotten time has resurged to make a hole in the texture of his reconstruction. While Bertrand’s novel, at the moment of itspublication,isapiercedbasket,Truffaut’sfilmdoesnotevenallowthe joins between the willow canes to be seen. Think, for example, of the superb transition at the beginning whereby Bertrand is restored to life: the women’s legs, filmed in a low-angle shot from his grave, are replaced by those that the hero, while still alive, was pursuing in the street. Truffaut deserves the title of “king of the invisible flashback”2 that he awarded to Lubitsch and Buñuel. All the inventive work of the film inheres in the making of a container of which the ingenuousness, the complexity, and the beauty reflect the skill of a craftsman who has fully mastered his craft. Concerning the content, the filmmaker makes his hero say, when speaking about his mother: “One doesn’t invent such things.” By the time he was making the film, Truffaut had come to understand the autobiographical nature of the unconscious projections that his films reveal. The Man Who Loved Women plays on this knowledge withacertainirony.BertrandresemblesAntoineDoinel,CharlieKohler, Pierre Lachenay, Montag, Louis Mahé, and Claude Roc. Furthermore, Fetishism and Mourning 253 his story had already been presented in the dialogue of Shoot the Piano Player when one of the two gangsters tells how his father died–an inveterate womanizer who was hit by a car while he was looking at a woman’s legs.ThischaracterisalsoanextensionofFergusinTheBrideWoreBlack, who was similarly played by Charles Denner. Additionally, Truffaut was partly inspired by the intimate diaries...