Some money for the whorehouse...

"The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money."

                                                                                     

                                             Marlon Brando

All of a sudden I feel like my blog entries are all becoming malevolent and sardonic--my last entry for Jean-Luc Godard's, Contempt, after all, is downright hateful. But then I remember that the current film I'm writing about, Francois Truffaut's "self-conscious" "feature," La Nuit Americaine, as well as Godard's, Contempt, are both films about...well...making films. And their "insider's" look at the degenerate nature of the small class of people who populate this gratuitous and nonessential (if not downright detrimental) industry, of course explains my rancor. Although Truffaut's film shows a...uh...more benign and "romantic" side of filmmaking, it still illustrates the childish dysfunction and acute narcissism of a class of people that I would just assume see collectively tied to cinder blocks, at the bottom of the Detroit River. Included in this desire, would be the veritable ocean of insignificant, sycophantic, "aspiring," desperate, groveling underlings doing all of the "behind-the-scenes" work as well.

But since we are discussing the French New Wave, and not--directly--the pervasive detriment of Hollywood and our modern media juggernaut, it is necessary to not get carried away here. And anyway, my entry for Godard's, Contempt, is probably as much as I need to say about all of that. La Nuit Americaine is Francois Truffaut's filmic admission of his life-long love and obsession for the art of filmmaking. And in its purest, most unspoiled form, before money, fame, and success have profaned it, that is a love I can dig and respect. Perhaps the sincerest conveyances in this film, of Truffaut's love and passion, are nothing more than a couple of brief, dreamy interludes. Of course, there is the repeated flashbacks to Truffaut's childhood mission, of stealing Citizen Kane posters from a theatre. But the most elegant and subtle conveyance of Truffaut's love, is simply the brief interlude where we hear the beautiful and melodic score over the telephone (and in the diegesis), as we see Truffaut thumb through a number of books on films and his favorite auteurs. I feel that this is a graceful and dignified gesture of respect and admiration to his influences and inspirations.

But that is where the poetry ends. The rest of the film is--consciously or unconsciously--one dizzying and irritating example after the other, of what a sordid, dysfunctional, contemptible, pampered, unreasonable class of people populate the film industry. From Severine's (Valentina Cortese) inebriated vacuousness, to Alphonse's (Jean-Pierre Leaud) fatuous pitifulness, we are continuously subjected to the kind of melodramatic bullshit that one expects from spoiled children. And what makes this all worse, is the unarguable fact that there is no exaggerating exactly how fucked most of these kind of people are. Despite the harmlessness of Julie's (Jacqueline Bisset) admittedly laughable request for "tub butter," as she balances on the brink of--yet--another emotional collapse (after sleeping with that pitiful dingbat, Alphonse), it still makes a conscious human being want to throw her out of the fucking window. Or at least start looking for the aforementioned cinder blocks. And likewise, when that miserable wretch, Alphonse, finally leaves his room after being--understandably--dumped for the stuntman, and declares that he needs some money for the whorehouse (although that is pretty fucking funny--pitiful, but funny).

In this context, and combined with the myriad of other obstacles and challenges the director faces, it is--indeed--easy to say that La Nuit Americaine is an extremely "romantic" depiction of an artist's struggle to simply finish his film. Which seems fine. Truffaut obviously loved the art of filmmaking, and as I've already stated, I can respect that. Any condemnation I have, does not lie in the accuracy of this film's portrayal, of the formidableness of making a "feature"--I'm sure, that in this respect, the film is dead on. My vehement condemnation and animosity lies with the actual class of human detritus this film portrays. And in this respect, I wouldn't be honest, if I didn't say that Truffaut himself, sounds like he was a little too self-indulgently shrouded in "romantic" subjectivity, if he was indeed confused (actually, his own word was "tormented") about the question: "Is cinema more important than life?" That sounds like the kind of Hollywood director that would spend twice as much time and money making a film about some kind of awful tragedy, than what he would spend in time and money to actually help ameliorate it.