Volume 37, Number 15 · October 11, 1990
Night for Day
By Julian Barnes
François Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945–1984
edited by Gilles Jacob, edited by Claude de Givray, translated by Gilbert Adair, foreword by Jean-Luc Godard
Noonday, 590 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Near the start of Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste there is a deft moment of authorial cheek. Charlie (Charles Aznavour) returns from the piano bar to his rented room and climbs wearily into bed, cuddling an ashtray the size of a salad bowl. Clarisse (Michèle Mercier), the jolly tart who lives next door, sidles in with an offer. Charlie says he lacks the money; she offers him credit; he declines; she nonetheless stays. She undresses and sits up in bed, her breasts fully visible, talking about a movie she's just seen. He interrupts her: 'In the cinema, it's always like this,' he says, pulling the bedclothes up around her into a parody of the starlet-sitting-respectably-up-in-bed shot. It is lightly done, and fits the jokey, tumbling relationship between Charlie and Clarisse. Still, it has its echo. In the cinema, it's always like this: but it isn't like this in life, and from now on it won't be like this in the cinema either.
Review, 3369 words
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