Truffaut's Emotional Response to Women: How it Shapes What He Says About Women in His Films?

I will start with Truffaut’s first film, 400 Blows (1959), and derive what he might have felt towards women since that film is the most directly autobiographical one of all his films. As a boy, Antoine, who can be thought of as Truffaut’s alter ego, is seen as being rejected constantly by his mother in the film. She yells at him a lot, does not give him affection, and remarks at one point how Antoine ‘gets on her nerves’ to her husband. 

Antoine does not reject his mother even though he is a rebel at school and in general to his parents. He even tries to “obey” his mother when she offers him money to do well in school, although it was not kindness on her part, but selfish fear that Antoine will tell the father about her affair. This lack of love from his mother seems to create a longing in Antoine for love that he never received in childhood. 

In addition, it is known in psychotherapy that when someone does not receive the love they needed in childhood from their mother, the most important person to receive it from, other emotions get created in response to that lack. Emotions like anger, obsession, idealization, and even hatred can be a child’s response, and of course left uncared for or dealt with, these emotions will stay with the child through adulthood. Therefore, Antoine (Truffaut) continues to express a longing for the love of his mother including many other emotions toward women in general, in Truffaut’s other Antoine series films and many of Truffaut’s other films.