"I'm 14 - Ah, he's a bit old for the part - Oh yeah, but I'm not that old, so [...] - You look 12 and a half, don't you? - Well, yeah, so he said he needed a boy who's mocking. That's why ... because I'm not one of those intellectuals, I'm just not [...] - And tell me, are you rather sad or cheerful in life? - Oh, I'm definitely happy, I'm not sad!” Jean-Pierre Léaud and François Truffaut before the shooting of Quatre Cents Coups

Thus began their great partnership. And Léaud, who certainly never imagined that he would become the guardian of the memory of a cinema from the 1930s to the Nouvelle Vague, always remained a mocker. The energy he unleashed as a child gave way to a gaze that was sometimes shy and perpetually astonished, sometimes determined and kind. The images of BFM 37 immortalise the child Léaud (on the run, in F. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups), the Léaud now seduced, now seducer (with Catherine Duport in J.-L. Godard's Masculin Féminin) and the Maoist Léaud, an assertive and revolutionary gaze (J. Godard's La Chinoise). The individual images multiply (actually develop) on the same plane, revealing a potentially endless (and never the same) cycle of sensations and reactions, animated by an underlying restlessness that makes Léaud a complex and fragile character.

(made in StudioSuq)

madefilmfestival.it

(made in StudioSuq)