The best of Truffaut's late films




Francois Truffaut follows in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville by adapting a popular genre as a serious allegory for the darkest period in French history: the Nazi Occupation. Just as Melville used the gangster film to examine notions of legality, legitimacy, authority and criminality in a period when the Resistance were outlaws and the police rounding up Jews for the death camps, so Truffaut takes the beloved putting-on-a-show warhorse, and uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of life in Occupied France: the need to act, adapt and continually discard roles. When Depardieu's character leaves to fight for the Resistance, he
puns about exchanging his make-up (maquillage) for the maquis.

What Truffaut is most interested in, as in all his films, is the effect this need for constant dissembling has on individual identity and relationships. This wonderful romantic comedy plays like a mature update of 'Casablanca', richly stylised, bravely open-ended, with Truffaut's moving camera wrenching spirit from the claustrophobic confines.

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Audrey Tautou Biography

  Earning effusive comparisons to another Audrey, sylph-like French actress Audrey Tautou became an international star with her performance as the eponymous do-gooder in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's romantic fable Amélie (2001).Born in Beaumont, France, Tautou's childhood interest in monkeys led to plans to become a primatologist, but she found her true calling when she began to study acting in school. After graduation, Tautou found roles on French TV, and earned Canal+'s prize in 1999 for Best Newcomer. Moving to films, Tautou quickly made a mark with her performance as Natalie Baye's young co-worker in Venus Beauty Institute (1999) and earned the César for Best New Actress. While Tautou worked steadily, playing a supporting role in the ribald Denis Diderot biopic Le Libertin (2000) and leads in Voyous Voyelle (2000) and Happenstance (2000), her appearance in Venus Beauty Institute pr
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Bedtime stories

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How is it that it's been just three days since my vacation and already I am feel sleep deprived? Clearly, I have a problem. Clearly, this problem is serious since it was not remedied by a whole week of sleeping in until past 11 a.m. Though, thinking about this issue in the wee small hours of the morning, I realized that perhaps my problem is simply motivation. Because, well, if any of these women were in my bed I'd have no problem crawling under the covers. Of course, whether we'd sleep or not is entirely another matter. Hmm, perhaps this is the wrong kind of motivation after all. Wrong but delicious. Famke Janssen Audrey Tautou Angelina Jolie
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