La camera verde

I totally disagree with Maltin. Truffaut's The Green Room was destined not to be a crowd pleaser: unlike his most famous films celebrating life (Jules and Jim being the most obvious example) the film is serious in tone and deals with death, Truffaut himself playing the death-obsessed newspaperman.

The Green Room is nonetheless a very impressive film; the questions of the forms of love, life versus death, possession and the remembrance of those who have passed away are treated both intellectually (but not in an 'artsy' or artificial way) and emotionally (but not in a melodramatic way despite an interwoven love story).

The film is surprisingly short and the ending comes even a bit abruptly, so contrary to possible expectations it is not long and dull. The Green Room reminded me of The Magnificent Ambersons and (John Huston's) The Dead, which are also films to be recommended.

Green Room, The (1978)

** (out of 4)

Truffaut plays a journalist still grieving the death of his wife nearly ten years after her passing. Her passing helped his obsession of death, which ends up making him a friend in an equally strange woman (Nathalie Baye) who also has her own interesting thoughts on the subject. As his obsession grows deeper, the man decides to buy a chapel and turn it into a sanctuary for his wife and other dead friends. This is an extremely bizarre film from Truffaut and while I'm still new to his work, this here is certainly the least entertaining of his films that I've seen. I think the entire film is just one real big mess that never really makes sense of what it's trying to do. I couldn't help but feel a tad bit lost as the movie never really seems clear as to what it's trying to say about death as both characters are pulling in opposite directions. I found their relationship to be extremely forced and completely make belief as not for a single second did I feel either one could care for the other. Another minor issue was the performance by Baye, which I thought was rather weak. The problem with this is that Truffaut was pretty good and the two just don't work very well together and in the end it hurts the film because not only does their relationship feel weak but it doesn't help that the actor is so many better than the partner. I'd be lying if I said I hated this movie because I really didn't. There just wasn't anything here that kept me overly entertained and in the end I was just too bored by the characters and screenplay.

Eleven years after the end of World War I, in a small village in the East of France, the journalist Julien Davenne (François Truffaut) still grieves the death of his beloved wife Julie ten years ago. He worships Julie in a green room in his house decorated with her pictures and belongings. When he meets auctioneer's assistant Cecilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye) in an auction house, they see that they have in common the obsession for death and become close to each other. When a fire destroys his green room, Julien convinces the bishop to restore the local chapel and prepare it as a sanctuary for Julie and his dead friends to preserve their memories, while Cecilia falls in love for him, but Julien is dead inside.

"La Chambre Verte" is the darkest of the Truffault's movies that I have seen. The melancholic romance has a beautiful cinematography; has great performances with Truffault in the role of Julien Davenne, a man that writes obituaries in the dying newspaper Le Globe and most of his friends have already died, and the gorgeous Nathalie Baye as an old acquaintance that falls in love for him. But the story is extremely unpleasant and somber and I did not like it. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Quarto Verde" ("The Green Room")

Francois Truffaut certainly spread his net widely when sourcing filmic material and has here drawn inspiration from two short stories and a novella by Henry James. There is something of the biographical in most of Truffaut's oeuvre but this is indisputably his most intensely personal and heartfelt.

The death of his contemporaries, notably his mentor André Bazin and film archivist Henri Langlois, made him all too aware of his own mortality and he has cast himself as Julien Davanne, a writer of obituaries, whose obsession is to create a chapel of remembrance for his late, beloved wife and others who have touched his life. This brings him into contact with Cecilia who is mourning a man who was once a friend of Julien's but who had since betrayed him........

Despite its depressingly morbid subject matter this is a film that once seen, is not easily forgotten and the suitably gloomy atmosphere is courtesy of Néstor Almendros' muted cinematography. Truffaut had also felt the loss of one of France's greatest film composers, Maurice Jaubert, who perished in the early days of WWII and his use of Jaubert's music is inspired, especially in the chapel scenes. The eagle eyed will no doubt spot the photograph of Oskar Werner in the guise of a German soldier. He and Truffaut had worked together twice and ironically, were both fated to die the same year.

Julien's scenes with the mute boy Georges are reminiscent of those between Dr. Itard and Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in 'L'Enfant Sauvage' and reveal that Julien is capable of showing compassion for the living as well as for the dead.

The question that arises in both films is whether Truffaut made the right decision in casting himself as the leading character. Personally I feel that although Truffaut got away with it in the earlier film he does not fare as well in this. He is suitably forbidding and distant but there is such a thing as dramatic license and the role ideally required an actor of greater range. Truffaut himself was later to acknowledge this. He certainly got it right however when casting Nathalie Baye whose performance as Cecilia is simply stupendous and touches the heart.

Although critically well received the film was commercially catastrophic which not only affected the director's health but caused him to lose financial backing from the French arm of United Artists.

Based upon the principle that 'everyone has their dead' Truffaut felt that the film would strike a chord with audiences but he had sorely underestimated the capacity of most humans to overcome their grief and failed to recognise that for the majority, 'Life belongs to the living'.

"La chambre verte" is one of the most strange, if not the strangest work of Truffaut. An adaptation of the novel "The beast and the jungle" by Henry James, it deals with one of the most uncomfortable topics for a film; death. Or, actually, what happens to those that are left alive, when a person from their intimate environment dies.

Julien Davenne, the hero (played by Truffaut himself), is obsessed with death, since the loss of his dear wife, Julie. While everyone tells him to forget her, and move on, he finds it disrespectful to her memory to do so. Instead, he decides to build a chapel, where he will honour his "dead". People he had once known, family, friends that perished in the war. There is even a photo of an unknown German soldier, whom Davenne had killed during the fightings of World War One. To Davenne, death makes no discriminations, he takes everyone, and it's the duty of the living to remember the dead, otherwise, they'll be forgotten.

Having no one as family, except for a child, unable to speak, communicating with him only with signs, and his caretaker, an old lady, Davenne shares his opinions and worries with a young woman (Nathalie Baye). She is shocked by what she hears, at first, but later comes to understand the motives behind Davenne's way of thinking.

Which are those motives? In my opinion, Truffaut tried to present with this film a portrait of the French Lost Generation. Those, who would have been young enough to go fight in World War One. Few of them returned, since France had some of the highest casualties in that war. The war to end all wars. It didn't end them, but it ended relationships, friendships, families. In the film, Davenne laments that his now deceased wife waited for his return from the front for four years. Unfortunately, she didn't get to enjoy their being together for long. Death got her first.

After the First World War, the world was shocked by the disaster, and the death the conflict had brought. And, so, art became obsessed with death. The artists of this Lost Generation rejected the conservatism of their predecessors, it being an element of a pre-war era of carelessness. In their works, they portrayed the death of those seen in the front, or other topics, in an abstract manner. In that way, they wanted to show the madness of war.

What does all this have to do with the film? Davenne is also a member of this generation. One of the lucky ones, that didn't die. But, for him, Julie's loss is kind of a spiritual death. He is as fixated with the concept of death as those artists. Through his chapel,first located in the titular green room in his house, he makes his own attempt at dealing with this stream of deaths the war brought. For him, everyone death deserves to be remembered. But, for a society wanting to move on, this behaviour is abnormal. Why would one want to remain in the past, in a past so traumatic? Truffaut gave his answer through the film.

History, as saddening as this is, would justify Davenne. Because, for all the fun and prosperity that France and the world experienced in the Roaring twenties - in France, tellingly known as "Les années folles" , the crazy years- the next decade's end would bring with it the most catastrophic war human history has ever witnessed. And, then, no one could escape thinking about death. It would simply be everywhere.