A New Wave icon revisited

Looming over them all - irascible, maddening, inescapable - is Jean-Luc Godard. He's been basically (and proudly) missing in action for several decades - which makes the enduring innovativeness of his work in the '60s all the clearer. Godard, more than anyone else, lent the New Wave its newness.

It didn't always appear that way. For much of his career, Francois Truffaut was seen as the contemporary French filmmaker: heir of Jean Renoir, intimate of Alfred Hitchcock, even casting choice of Steven Spielberg. (The number of people familiar with Truffaut's two dozen features is surely a fraction of those who've seen his brief supporting performance in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.")

Truffaut is the subject of a seven-film retrospective, "Francois Truffaut: Man, Woman & Child," at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, which opens Friday. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of the release of Truffaut's first feature, "The 400 Blows." It kicks off the series. Also being screened are "The Soft Skin"; the autobiographical trilogy "Stolen Kisses," "Bed and Board," and "Love on the Run"; "The Wild Child"; and "Jules and Jim." (Is that film or Godard's "Breathless" the signature New Wave title? It's one of the great classifying questions, like "Matisse or Picasso?" and "Beatles or Stones?")

For many filmgoers, Truffaut wasn't just the face of the French New Wave - he was the face of foreign film. Bergman was severe and literary, Antonioni opaque and mannered, Fellini flamboyant and mannered in a very different way. Truffaut, though, was just right: intelligent, humane, accessible. No less movie-mad than Godard, he was as literary as Rohmer (never forget how many of Truffaut's films were adaptations or period pieces). He allowed cultivated filmgoers to feel simultaneously au courant and traditional.

Yet Truffaut seems now so much a figure of the past. In part, that's a cruel irony of mortality. Truffaut died in 1984, in what should have been the middle of his career. He was only 52. That's a dangerous age for any artist. Youthful energy is depleted, yet the wisdom of experience has only just begun to accumulate. Middle age contributes nothing to reputation. To die young is to acquire an aura of promise - and benefit from the romance of premature loss. To die at an advanced age is to have the status of old master - and benefit from the patination of nostalgia.

More than that, though, there was always a softness to Truffaut. (Although a lesser work, "The Soft Skin" has one of Truffaut's most revealing titles.) Softness was part of what drew audiences to him then. It's part of what makes him seem so much less compelling now. Even at its most energetic - "Jules and Jim," "Shoot the Piano Player" - Truffaut's filmmaking always favors lyricism at the expense of urgency.

Of course, "tenderness" is another word for "softness." Tenderness is surely good - as softness likely isn't. One mark of Truffaut's tenderness was his affinity for young characters and outsiders. The classic instance was "The 400 Blows." But there are numerous others, the most notable being "The Wild Child," a very different film. Barely a decade separates the two, yet the contrast says a great deal about the evolution of Truffaut's sensibility as he journeyed from periphery to mainstream. The rebellious youth in "400 Blows" is achingly based on his own experience. The hero of "The Wild Child" isn't the title character; rather, he's a (benevolent) authority figure - played by Truffaut, no less.

The limitations of Truffaut's tenderness become all too apparent when one compares him to his onetime collaborator and close friend Godard. That they should have had a painful falling out seems inevitable. The older Truffaut got, the more domestic and bourgeois his filmmaking became. Could his final film, "The Last Metro," really have been made by the same man who did "Shoot the Piano Player"? Godard went in the opposite direction. Older has meant wilder, as well as more abstract and radical (a radicalness that has extended far beyond politics).

This divergence can be seen in their fundamental response to the filmgoing experience. Both men began as film critics and wrote extensively. Reading Godard, you get the sense he'd be content just sitting in a darkened room, cigar stuck in his mouth, watching shadowy motions on a screen. If the shadows had been directed by Nicholas Ray, then so much the better - but it's the experience of motion intersecting with imagination, film at its most elemental and visceral, that transports him. Far more refined, Truffaut required for full satisfaction the sweetness of story, the familiarity of stardom, the ease of expert craft. He watched movies with his heart, Godard with his nervous system.

To be sure, that's not entirely fair. Truffaut's early films have a nervy energy and sense of experiment that remain potent all these decades later. "Jules and Jim," to cite the most obvious example, was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. But here again Truffaut would prove the victim of circumstances beyond his control.

The French New Wave was one of numerous elements that helped usher in the '60s as a cultural and political phenomenon. Where Godard reveled in the climate of rebellion (and did more than any other filmmaker to help further it), Truffaut shrank from it. Looking back through the lens of so much subsequent upheaval (cinematic and otherwise), we see tame charm in those early films, rather than the newness of form and openness to experience that made them seem such a revelation at the time.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.