This section contains 5,426 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: "Truffaut's Gorgeous Killers," in Film Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Winter, 1973–74, pp. 2-10.
In the following essay, Kinder and Houston consider the changing roles of women in Truffaut's films.
The central character in many of Truffaut's films is a profoundly seductive woman steeped in the archetypal mystery of the belle dame sans merci; she uses her sexual liberation like a femme fatale, to destroy a hero who is either sensitive and needy, or who mistakenly believes that his rationality will enable him to cope with her magic. Truffaut's earliest films present a combination of attraction and hostility in response to this kind of woman. In Les Mistons (1957), a group of boys tease and torment a young woman who is awakening their adolescent desires; they cannot forgive her amorous behavior with her fiancé, who later dies in an accident. In The 400 Blows (1959), the young boy is most vulnerable to...
This section contains 5,426 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |
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