THE LITTLE THIEF
With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Didier Bezace, Simon de la Brosse, Raoul Billerey, and Chantal Banlier.
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The film certainly aims to be Truffaut-like in both style and content, and in superficial ways it succeeds. Unfortunately, the Truffaut it honors is basically the mythical Truffaut–the professional nice guy with a compassionate eye for rebellious youth, puppy love, and little kittens lapping up milk, not the more complex Truffaut who made The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, The Soft Skin, Fahrenheit 451, The Wild Child, or The Green Room. Just as the popular image of Jean Renoir as the maker of humanist classics like Grand Illusion, A Day in the Country, and The River tends to obscure the darker and more experimental sides of his work, thereby assigning such brilliant works as La nuit du carrefour, Diary of a Chambermaid, and The Woman on the Beach to oblivion, it’s the peaches-and-cream side of Truffaut that has come to stand for the essence of his work–the cutesy light movies like Small Change–rather than the morbid dark side revealed by The Green Room (my favorite of his late works, and uncoincidentally his biggest commercial flop).
In a recent issue of Sight and Sound, Truffaut critic Don Allen reports that the camera in the plot is Miller’s own addition. Allen also quotes the French version’s closing title, “Medical tests revealed that her baby would probably be extremely restless,” which bears no resemblance to the closing title in the U.S. version. This suggests that Miller initially brightened Truffaut’s ending for French audiences, and then brightened it still further for American audiences, no doubt assuming (correctly) that this was the kind of Truffaut that was wanted over here. (I don’t know whether Raoul’s magical appearance in the newsreel was Truffaut’s idea or Miller’s, but the rather ludicrous execution of it–Raoul actually waves at the camera to make sure that we recognize him–comes across as Truffaut at his worst.)
The problem with The Little Thief as a tribute to Truffaut, then, is that it gives us only one half of the dialectic–the half that made money, won prizes, and elicited misty appreciation of his love for the human race–and denies the other half, the one that made him, at his best, a good deal more complicated. Perhaps if The Little Thief goes on to make a bundle, Claude Miller will consider making a feature to celebrate Truffaut’s other half; but I wouldn’t count on it.
