The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

248 Neil LaBute
if anyone, is shortchanged a bit; her character Franca has the least amount
of time, and we understand her as a person the least. But we understand
certainly how she is motivated, because it’s fairly broad strokes of desire and
hurt and revenge and those kinds of things. But I think that, for me, is all the
better because I didn’t have to suffer through it, but I get to reap the benefits
of his emotional understanding of that story.
How then did it change your life?
LaBute: It exposed me, probably in the earliest way, to “Hey, I could do
that.” I’ve never been one to love the camera or even to be as drawn to it as I
am to the human aspect of it, and I think it was a film that speaks in a very
simple way of here’s a way that you can tell a story on film in human terms.
It was the kind of film that made me go, “I could do this; I want to tell stories
that are like this and told in this way.” And so it was altering for me in that
way, in its simplicity or deceptive simplicity.
It reminds me of something from roughly the same time, Godard’s A Married
Woman, and subsequent films that I saw after that, films by Rohmer, who
I’m a huge fan of. Another one who you never say, “Oh what a great tracking
shot, what a great this and that” but “How incisive!”—I’m using incisive too
often—but how close to the bone this guy understands people, what great
understanding into the mind, into the heart.
What’s interesting for me is just the arc. When he was a film critic,
Truffaut embraced films that talked about bringing about a new morality
or a new way to look at human relationships. By the time he gets
to Jules et Jim, he’s turned that on its ear with a modern three-way relationship
and explains why that doesn’t work and how it still falls into
the same problems. By the time you get to the fourth film, The Soft
Skin, he’s very contemporary in his morality.
LaBute: Although, in a way, it’s probably much more bourgeois in that film,
even though it’s got a more modern feel than, say, Jules et Jim, because it’s a
radical approach. It’s a radical story, especially for the time that the story’s
set in. It’s a very freewheeling ménage there that those three are executing,
compared to this story. It plays out in a dalliance; then there’s the decision
really to go back to it, if at all possible.