Truffaut: growing backwards into childhood

François Truffaut believed that artworks resemble their makers. As the BFI presents a retrospective of his films, it is clear that the man who made them was the most humane of directors
Henri Serre, Oskar Werner and Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim
Henri Serre, Oskar Werner and Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Photograph: Courtesy of BFI

It seems a cliché that a film might change your life. Yet a film by the French director François Truffaut changed mine. Having just heard of how, in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, a child was brought up in a hen house, I watched L'Enfant sauvage (Wild Child) (1969) late one night on BBC2. It presented the story of Victor, a young boy discovered, in the years following the French revolution, living wild and alone in the woods of France. The film so mesmerised and moved me that I began researching a book on Victor and children like him.

In L'Enfant sauvage, Truffaut himself played Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, the young man who educated the wild boy, teaching him language, attentiveness and, in however flawed a way, connection. The film was in some ways autobiographical; Truffaut had himself been a young delinquent who was sent to a reform school for truancy. As Itard attempts to rescue Victor, so the great film critic André Bazin rescued Truffaut, bringing him into his home and encouraging him as a writer and cinephile.

Watching L'Enfant sauvage again, I am still startled by its beauty, its restraint, its presiding clarity. As shot by Néstor Almendros, it is filled with candles glowing in night-time rooms, the glare of summer sunshine and the gleam of moonlight. Just like the text by Itard on which it is based, Truffaut's film expresses both the romanticism of Victor's impassioned longing for the woods and the moon, and also the clinical compassion with which his stiff-necked, reserved teacher offers him the values of civilisation.

Truffaut's early films manifest L'Enfant sauvage's fascination with motion and stasis. In Jules et Jim (1962) the film sometimes momentarily halts, marking the impact of a gesture, the moment of an impression becoming a memory. In Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), there is a remarkable fairground scene where the young Antoine Doinel, playing truant from school, climbs into the Rotor, a huge spinning drum. The drum spins, the centrifugal force pinning him against its wall; it hurtles on, but Doinel holds still before us, simultaneously whirled about and held down.

On a larger scale, Les quatre cents coups moves from the freedom of Paris to fenced-in spaces, prison-bars, an institutional chill and solitude. When, at the film's end, Doinel races away, the camera steadily keeps pace with him, another image of energy and stillness. The release of motion discovers a kind of calm; the film's closing shot, a freeze-frame of Doinel running by the ocean, grasps him in a moment of hopefulness.

Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Pianist) (1960) also begins with a man running, before he collides with a lamp-post. In the vein of série noir, the movie translates an American crime novel by David Goodis into a peculiarly French milieu. It's a pastiche of gangster movies by someone who did not much care for gangsters. In place of thrills and brutality stands Charles Aznavour's preoccupied charisma, a hero frowning his way through a film of quirks and passing gags. He's a perfect stand-in for Truffaut himself, with the same appeal of a fragility that can suddenly turn tough. The film's real theme is marriage, the action sauced with discussions of lust and romance. It's a film noir without the darkness; only the trappings of the genre remain – the flashbacks, the Philip Marlowe trench-coat; life is refracted through an adolescence spent before a cinema screen. With its discontinuities and displaced charm, this would remain Truffaut's most new wave film. Yet it is a spirited movie, its final shoot-out in the snow presaging the magnificent close of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller.

For Truffaut, childhood meant classic literature, abandonment and cinema; all three permeate his films. His work now seems part of a vanished argument about whether we should enjoy films for their lightness, even their triviality, or whether they could express the same depth as the great novels. Truffaut conceived the puzzlingly excellent The Man Who Loved Women (1977) as a novel as well as a film, and its theme is as much about writing as philandering. At the end of the hero's interchangeable seductions, all that remains is his book.

Truffaut was a film-maker who grew up obsessed equally with Honoré de Balzac and Alfred Hitchcock. Both cinematic and literary, he united qualities that are these days most often seen apart. In Les quatre cents coups, the young Antoine Doinel constructs a shrine to Balzac and nearly burns down his flat; it is hard to imagine the heroine of Fish Tank lighting a candle for Henry James.

All his films repay watching, and nine or 10 of them are masterpieces of cinema that everyone should see. Yet Truffaut has appeared to some as an example of a dreary art-house officialdom, as though his work was there to browbeat you into taking it as Great Art. The American critic Manny Farber rebuked Truffaut for weighting things in favour of his poor, persecuted heroes, and dismissed him as a man whose theme was growing backwards into childhood, "all seem reduced to some unreal innocence of childhood myths". It seems to me that these perceived failings were Truffaut's strengths.

The hero in The Man Who Loved Women engineers a meeting with a young, blonde babysitter. She arrives at his house and, having looked around, asks where is the baby. "The baby," the man replies, "is me." Many of his best films are concerned with youth, from Les Mistons (The Brats) (1957), with its gang of kids persecuting and adoring an older girl in the neighbourhood, to the charm and sympathetic comedy of the schoolchildren in L'Argent de poche (Small Change) (1976). When I first saw Jules et Jim, aged 20, it was the air of sophistication that entranced me: how could anyone ever get to be so knowing? Watching it again, I am beguiled by the film's innocence.

Jules et Jim is an epic of inconsequence, the historical sweep of the first world war and the rise of nazism reduced to interruptions to the enigmatic potentialities of private life. It takes place in a world without work or money worries; there are merely the characters' yearnings, their bicycle rides and their impulsive gestures. At the time, this portrait of two male friends in love with the same woman shocked some, and was banned in Italy, Spain and Portugal. It might shock some still, were it not for its acquired aura of respectability.

Truffaut declared that what attracted him to the Henri-Pierre Roché novel on which the film is based was the strange combination of the licentiousness of individual scenes and the innocence of the whole. The film shows a stab at freedom caught in time, self-consciously modern lives played in period costumes and styles. That sense of period renders everything ironic, melancholy. Still we sense the allure of Europe, of youth, the world and the future opening up to the curious. Every Truffaut movie comes with this teaspoon of nostalgia.

In a career-move typical of the best nouvelle vague directors, such as Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Godard, Truffaut metamorphosed from a very young film critic to a young director, and in some people's eyes, the critic's cerebral stance clings to his movies, making him cautious, eager to pack in meaning, over-aware of the history of "classic film". It is true that distance delineates his work: he favours the long shot, and when talking to each other, those lifelong friends Jules and Jim always retain the formal "vous". Yet Truffaut himself affirmed that his work was "more instinctive than intellectual". As a journalist, his criticism had always been as much an expression of passion as an exercise in discrimination. In his work there is wit and, above all, an encompassing empathy lacking from some among the nouvelle vague.

For all his faults, Truffaut expresses a comprehensive sense of human failings and human fortitude, lessons learned from his heroes, Balzac and Jean Renoir. His is the comedy of misadventure, a hymn to human incompetence. Truffaut's taste was for people on the margins, those for whom sympathy can be hard to find. In Jules et Jim, there is the real possibility that we might despise the impulsively fickle Catherine (Jeanne Moreau); yet there is always the knowledge that, if we do, the film has a larger sense of her and opens itself to her passion, her vitality and her foolishness. Although Doinel is a thief and truant, no viewer of Les quatre cents coups could believe that he deserves his fate; his stoic endurance, his shrug at the unfairness of life win us over.

Truffaut remarked that "films are not cans of baked beans. Like people, they've got to be conceived, received and scrutinised one by one." In The Man Who Loved Women, the hero, anxious as to how he should proceed with his own memoir, reads some famous autobiographies and concludes that there was no one way to write a book; each author's writing "is as personal to him as his fingerprints". Truffaut's belief that "films resemble the people who make them" was more than just the orthodoxy of a pioneer of "auteur theory", that way of thinking about cinema that concentrates on the creative personality of the "great directors". After all, it is this theory that underlies the British Film Institute's retrospectives.

At a time in France that saw "the death of the author", Truffaut affirmed that, in great art, we are brought close to the essence of an individual human being. If Truffaut's work resembles him, then we can only regret that a character so copious and kind – a director so intelligent and humane – should have died so early.

The Truffaut restrospective is at BFI Southbank until 28 March.