MBut what fly stung Quentin Tarantino? In the prestigious British journal Sight and Sound of the month of September, he knocks out François Truffaut with the vigor of a brigade ofInglourious Basterds attacking a squad of Nazi dignitaries. It all starts with a discussion with his old accomplice and co-host of the Video Archives Podcast Roger Avary. The two friends first evoke Claude Chabrol whose talent Tarantino praises… to better drive his comrade from the New Wave: “His thrillers are infinitely better than the appalling Truffaut-Hitchcock films which I find appalling. “I don’t really like Truffaut anyway,” continues the author of Pulp Fiction. There are exceptions, the main one being The Story of Adele H. But for the most part, Truffaut has the same effect on me as Ed Wood. I think he’s a passionate amateur, and clumsy. »
Speaking of the “Truffaut-Hitchcock films”, Tarantino refers to The bride was in black (1968) et The Mississippi Mermaid (1969), two adaptations Truffaut made of the works of Cornell Woolrich, the black novel specialist (and author of the short story Courtyard window), also known as William Irish. Two films which have just been released in theaters as part of a Carlotta Films retrospective entitled Truffaut, the golden years… There is no doubt that Tarantino would refute the name, he who compares Truffaut to Ed Wood, the specialist in the Z series stamped “worst filmmaker in the world”.
Tarantino had already touched upon, in his novel Once upon a time in Hollywood (translated from English by Nicolas Richard, Fayard, 2021), all his contempt for some of the great classics of Truffaut. His hero, Cliff Booth (the stuntman played by Brad Pitt in the film), remains unmoved by the torments of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows just like in front of the trio in love with Jules and Jim : “He had tried Truffaut twice, but had not hung”, writes Tarantino, “the films were boring”.
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Influence
Iconoclastic as it may seem, Tarantino’s subject is not totally new: he himself has always positioned himself as a Godardian (his production house, A Band Apartis a nod to Keeping to himself), Stanley Kubrick greatly preferred Claude Lelouch to François Truffaut, and an important silhouette ofOnce upon a time in Hollywood Roman Polanski has often mocked the lack of technical knowledge of New Wave directors.
The most surprising thing here is above all that Tarantino himself borrowed quite a bit from François Truffaut… including one of those “appalling Truffaut-Hitchcock films” that he mentions. The bride was in black et Kill Bill indeed have more than one thing in common. In Truffaut’s film, a woman (Jeanne Moreau) sees – just after her wedding – her husband collapsing before her eyes, shot dead with a shotgun at the exit of the church. She devotes the rest of her life to a meticulous revenge against all the actors of the plot. In Tarantino, “the Bride” (Uma Thurman), the bride, narrowly survives the massacre perpetrated on her wedding day against the participants in the ceremony. Both movies (Volumes 1 et 2) recount her revenge – against various targets whose names she crosses off a list once they are eliminated, just like Jeanne Moreau does.
Another common point, Tarantino’s films work by chapters, which is also the case with The bride by Truffault. Each victim corresponds to a narrative and even stylistic unit. And then in a particularly traumatic scene, Jeanne Moreau kills Michael Lonsdale while her son, a little boy of nine or ten, is present in the house… Uma Thurman kills one of her enemies, played by Vivica A. Fox, in front of his granddaughter, at the beginning of Volume 2. At the exit of Kill BillTarantino will claim to have never seen Truffaut’s film (!)
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He would therefore have filled this gap since, to see him hate The bride was in black with so much vigor. Another film testifies to a real influence of Truffaut on Tarantino: it isInglourious Basterds in which Mélanie Laurent runs a cinema in the middle of occupied Paris and has to deal with the occupier while hiding that she is Jewish. Something to remind the theater director that Catherine Deneuve portrays in The Last Metro. Another blonde with a bun who conceals from the Nazis the presence of her Jewish husband in the basement of the theatre.
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So many similarities which do not necessarily mean that Tarantino is in bad faith when he denounces the alleged clumsiness of Truffaut. Perhaps he allowed himself these borrowings precisely because he considers the Frenchman’s films to be defective material, easy to improve. He is certainly sincere in his praise of The Story of Adele H. : Kill Bill has sufficiently proven how much he too loves monomaniacal and obsessive heroines. And then, the critical Truffaut had a hard tooth… and would hardly have been shocked by this recourse to vitriol. Definitely, does Tarantino the man-cinema have more in common than he cares to admit with the one he loves to hate so much?