The Man Who Loved Women

François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women is a retrospective look at the life and many affairs of an unrepetant womanizer, a man who can't resist chasing after one woman after another, never settling for any one woman for very long. But Truffaut's film, unfortunately, is nearly as shallow as its protagonist, Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), who flits around after all these women, waxing poetic about their charms, the beauty of their bodies, and making his pursuit of them seem like an art, an expression of his philosophy about the world. Bertrand pours that philosophy out into the pages of the book he's writing, and it's around that book that Truffaut structures the film, relating anecdotes from Bertrand's past through the stories he writes in his lightly fictionalized novel.

This is, despite its potentially lurid subject matter, a curiously flat and dry affair, simply relating one interchangeable affair after another, as Bertrand serially seduces women he meets at random and women who he goes through elaborate machinations to encounter. As a comedy, it's not especially humorous, and as a character portrait it skates along the surface except for a few moments when the script (by Truffaut, Michel Fermaud and Suzanne Schiffman) delves into Bertrand's psychology only to come up with some trite rationalizations for his behavior. It's hard to know what's more disappointing, the fact that the film spends most of its time observing this man's surface presentation of himself, or the fact that when it does dig deeper, it comes up with only clichéd mommy issues and a failed romance that seemingly set him upon his current path.

Truffaut spends much of the film on the surface of Bertrand's life, but these glimpses into his formative experiences suggest a very simplistic psychology at the core of the film. Bertrand is copying the behaviors of his mother (Marie-Jeanne Montfajon), who was a promiscuous lover who didn't want a child to change her life, so she simply ignored her son as much as she possibly could. So Bertrand's desire to "collect" women is both an imitation of his mother and a kneejerk response to her neglect, causing him to be desperate for women's affection and attention. Or else Bertrand was deeply wounded by Véra (Leslie Caron), who appears late in the film, when it had seemed like Bertrand was incapable of a truly substantial relationship with a woman, to describe a time when he did have what could have been a real, significant love if he hadn't screwed it up. Both of these possibilities are floated as possible psychological explanations for Bertrand's attitude towards women, which reduces this character to little more than a collection of well-worn clichés.


At one point, Truffaut seems to anticipate the potential criticisms of his film and tries to duck around them with a scene where Bertrand sends his manuscript to some publishers. At a meeting regarding the manuscript at one of these publishing houses, none of the readers like the book except for Geneviève (Brigitte Fossey), who defends Bertrand's book against the criticisms of the others. Most of the critics' complaints about the book could just as easily apply to Truffaut's film — that its protagonist is too self-aggrandizing, that the psychology of it is uninteresting — but Geneviève deftly overturns their objections, thus defending the film as well, making these seem like both a preemptive defense and a self-congratulatory assertion of the film's success. She claims that Bertrand's story is simply full of "the contradictions of life," that the writer is actually self-aware about his own womanizing, which he is to some extent, but the implication that Truffaut's film is so dramatically unsatisfying because it's about reality is hard to take. This isn't reality but a flat, overly literary bundle of character types and shallow characterization.

There are, nevertheless, some nice moments here, scenes and performances that hint at a potentially more satisfying movie that Truffaut could have made. Denner's performance as the titular womanizer is mostly fine, projecting some of the charm and elegance that make this otherwise unremarkable-looking man so irresistible to so many women. But it's the women who really shine, and it's to Truffaut's credit that he populates the film with so many lively, winning performances from women, so that Bertrand's conquests become as much a tribute to the loveliness and appeal of all these actresses as they are a more general poem to the lure of women. Especially compelling is Nathalie Baye as a woman who Bertrand goes to great lengths to meet, only to find out that she's not the woman he thought she was. Baye's appearance, towards the beginning of the film, provides a tantalizing glimpse of a path not taken for Bertrand. Once he finds out that she's not actually the woman he'd glimpsed on the street one day and tracked down so relentlessly, he leaves, but Baye's shy smiles and straightforward manner make her a compelling presence, lingering past Bertrand's loss of interest, implicitly condemning his shallow fixations.

Many of the film's other women are equally compelling — Nelly Borgeaud as an unhappy housewife who gets off on danger, Valérie Bonnier as a girlfriend who eventually decides she needs more from a relationship than the cool Bertrand can offer — but by necessity none of these characters stick around very long or are developed beyond a few scenes. Truffaut's film ultimately just provides a mirror for Bertrand's life: shallow, self-absorbed, displaying a stereotypical masculinity and flitting from one moment to the next without ever spending too long with any one person or thinking too hard about the meaning of it all.

Small Change

With Small Change, François Truffaut returns again to the topic of childhood, one of the recurring thematic focuses of his films ever since his famous debut feature The 400 Blows. It's a loose, anecdotal film, charming and sweet if perhaps also a little lightweight. There's little structure here, simply a series of vignettes involving various children living in a small town, as well as their teachers, particularly Richet (Jean-François Stévenin), whose wife is expecting a child of their own.

The film meanders along at an easy pace, bouncing lightly from one gently comic anecdote to another. One continuing subtext throughout the film is Truffaut's focus on the dawning of sexuality, the first stirrings of feelings about the opposite sex. The boys are always spying on girls, catching glimpses of one woman's skirt riding up as she bends over or another girl bathing herself, naked, in her window. These flashes of nudity and sensuality have the illicit erotic charge of something not fully understood but powerfully felt regardless. Similarly, Truffaut captures the infatuation of one boy, Patrick (Georges Desmouceaux), with his friend's mother (Tania Torrens), gazing rapturously at her and associating her with a poster he sees of a man and a woman on vacation in a train car, locked in a pose that, for the young boy, seems replete with sexual promise: Truffaut cuts rapidly back and forth between closeups of the man and the woman in the poster, as though visualizing the way that the boy tries to make sense of the obvious attraction between the poster's couple.

Truffaut also drops a few subtle movie references into the film, in particular to Hitchcock's Rear Window. Patrick's father is confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed, and at one point he looks out his window and sees a man in the opposite flat stringing film through reels for a projector. But the Rear Window references are most potently realized in a clever sequence where Sylvie (Sylvie Grezel) is left at home by her parents because she's being stubborn, so she appeals to her neighbors in the adjoining buildings by using a bullhorn to announce that she's hungry. Truffaut's camera pans around the courtyard, where all the residents gather at the windows, and finally conspire to use a basket and a pulley system — like the basket used to raise and lower a dog in Hitchcock's film — to deliver some food to Sylvie for her lunch.


One curious scene is the one where the toddler Grégory plays with his cat by a window and hangs off the ledge when the cat falls to a lower balcony. Truffaut builds the obvious tension of this scene, in which the boy's mother has gone out and he's been left home alone, getting into a dangerous situation, edging into ever more precarious positions as he clambers clumsily along the balcony, hanging off the small rail that's the only protection between him and a fall of several stories. Down below, people start noticing and can only watch helplessly as the boy hangs off the rail and finally falls to the ground. At this point, Truffaut abruptly breaks the suspense by having the kid land on his butt and simply giggle, unfazed and unharmed by the fall, which in reality would certainly have injured him severely at the least. It's a totally puzzling scene, followed up by a conversation between Richet and his wife in which they conclude that kids are tougher than one thinks, which must be the trite moral that Truffaut wants to communicate here. But it comes off as a bizarre piece of fantasy, a surreal fracture in a film that is otherwise committed to low-key realism, really offputting in its casual dismissal of the danger of this scenario.

It's especially jarring because, while the film generally has a pretty light and rosy outlook on childhood, Truffaut doesn't flinch away from the story of Julien (Philippe Goldmann), a poor kid whose family is abusing and beating the boy, a discovery that only comes out during a school physical. This plotline is treated with real honesty and directness, and it provides the opportunity for a speech from Richet that sums up the movie's treatment of childhood: "life is hard, but it's wonderful."

For the most part, Truffaut leans more towards the "wonderful" here, and the film is charming and pleasant from beginning to end, with nicely naturalistic performances from all the amateur child actors. It's a low-key film, with only sporadic traces of the more emotionally intense approach to childhood that Truffaut had explored in The 400 Blows. For the most part, he gracefully and tastefully covers sexual awakening, friendship and teasing, petty stealing and pranks, with a light touch and a warm, affectionate sensibility. A sweet, unassuming film, Small Change is a slight trifle that's nevertheless often moving and quietly funny.

The Story of Adèle H.

François Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H. is a study of romantic obsession and madness, an intensely focused character study about the disintegration of a young woman's mind in the wake of a failed romance. Based on the diary of Adèle Hugo (Isabelle Adjani), the daughter of French writer Victor Hugo, the film concerns Adèle's desperate and unrequited love for the British lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson). Adèle follows Pinson to Halifax in Canada, where he deploys with the army during the American Civil War. She begins stalking and pursuing the chilly, disinterested lieutenant, who's earned a reputation as a womanizer and a spendthrift, amassing gambling debts and bedding many women while Adèle pines hopelessly for him.

Truffaut relates the story of Adèle's descent into madness with a simple, direct style, chronicling without ornament or sentiment the increasing desperation and sorrow of this young girl who suffers for her love, chasing a man who clearly has no interest in her anymore, who has already gotten all he ever wanted from her. The film's style is bleak and dry, and Néstor Almendros' images are restrained to a flat color palette of grays and browns, capturing the increasingly constricted and miserable world that Adèle, so focused on her love, barely even notices around her. The film is overly literary, tied, like many of Truffaut's films, to its script, and to the excerpts from Adèle's letters and journals, which she often reads in voiceover. The film often feels bogged down by words, by letters passing back and forth, and if not for the remarkable performance that Truffaut gets from his lead actress, there would be little to hold onto here.

The film is driven by Adjani's exceptional performance as the miserable Adèle. Adjani possesses a fragile, crystalline beauty that, as the film progresses, becomes increasingly pale and wispy, her skin the shade of paper, her eyes strained by her constant tears. She carries the film's full emotional weight, perfectly capturing the intense suffering of this lovesick woman. Adèle's misery could seem simply pathetic if Adjani's performance were not so raw and sensitive, so totally committed to conveying this young woman's passion and her pain. As she becomes more and more unhinged, she begins to look like a ghost, dressed in rags, unable any longer to disguise her madness behind the appearances of a respected young lady.

Adjani is a powerful central presence, gradually revealing more and more of her tormented inner life as the script slowly peels back the layers of her insanity. There are indications that Adèle's mind isn't especially stable even before her fruitless pursuit of Pinson definitively shatters her mental well-being. When someone tells Adèle that she must have been unhappy when her older sister died, she replies, "everyone in the family adored her," a non-answer that suggests her ambivalent feelings about the sister who looked so much like her but seemingly had her life much more in order than the obsessive, lonely Adèle. Adèle is haunted by dreams in which she's drowning, as though she identifies with her sister, who died so dramatically with her loving husband, unable to save her, drowning along with her. It seems as though Adèle almost envies this romantic tragedy, haunted by the knowledge that her dead sister not only was favored by the family, but possessed the true, intense, passionate love that Adèle herself so desperately desires.


Adèle's infatuation with Lieutenant Pinson causes her to profoundly disconnect from reality, concocting such an elaborate series of lies and distortions that it's soon not clear what she actually believes. While she fruitlessly pursues the lieutenant, she sends dispatches back to her concerned family in which she makes it seems as though she and Pinson are in love and preparing to be married. Adèle is so immersed in her love that she's detached from reality, at once knowing that Pinson will never marry her and yet clinging to an impossible, unrealistic hope that he will change his mind. Her love drives her to some rather pathetic behavior: she tells Pinson that if he marries her, she will allow him to continue seeing other women, and at one point she even hires a prostitute and sends her to Pinson for the night, though Truffaut discreetly cuts to black before revealing if Pinson accepted this outrageous gift or not. Adèle even considers hiring a hypnotist to hypnotize Pinson into marrying her, though she abandons this possibility when the hypnotist is revealed as a fraud.

Truffaut occasionally shifts the film's focus off of Adèle to clumsily discourse on her father. At one point, a doctor discovers Adèle's identity and explains, mostly to the audience, just who Victor Hugo is and why he's so important, delivering an exposition-laden speech about the great man's literary talent and political beliefs, as well as a condensed version of his biography. It's obvious that Truffaut wanted to present this miniature essay on Hugo, to express his admiration for the author who had been exiled for his convictions, but this material has been shoehorned in here, its tone forced and unconvincing. The same goes for the voiceover at the end of the film, in which a narrator abruptly steps in to describe what happens to Adèle after the film ends, as well as to discuss the death of Victor Hugo and the mourning for the great man across all of France. Most of the film is so resolutely focused on internality and emotion that these diversions into historical context, these odes to Hugo, feel very out of place.

The film as a whole is often interesting, thanks mainly to Adjani's strong performance, but it's also a curiously flat affair, anchored by that searing central performance and not much else. It's never clear why Truffaut thinks this story is so important, though the great import placed on Adèle's parentage raises the disturbing possibility that Truffaut is telling the story mainly because of his admiration for Victor Hugo, rather than because he finds Adèle herself so compelling. It's a study of emotional breakdown, but though Adjani commits completely to this role and powerfully conveys her character's fragmentation, it never feels like the film as a whole is as committed to these intense emotions as the actress is. Truffaut retains his distance, resting the film so completely on the actress that in the end, it's only her performance that makes an impact rather than the character or the story, let alone any ideas or themes that might arise from this tale.

Day For Night

François Truffaut's Day For Night is a love letter to the movies, a celebration of everything that happens on a film set, from the moment the director says "action" to the moment he says "cut" and everything that goes on around those boundaries, the personal dramas and business negotiations and constant attention to tiny details that all gets woven into the finished product of a movie. Truffaut himself plays a director making a movie, a melodramatic tragedy called Meet Pamela, and Day for Night is structured entirely around the production of the film within the film, with sporadic detours into the romantic dramas of the cast and crew, as well as the day-to-day logistical problems associated with making a movie.

The film is a love letter not just to the movies, but to a specific form of movies, the studio-bound big production. Truffaut at times seems to think he's making an elegy for a dead form of movie-making; his character, the director Ferrand, says in voiceover that this kind of movie is outdated, that from now on movies will be shot in the streets rather than on studio sets. Truffaut is offering a nostalgic look back at the movies made before the French New Wave came along, seemingly with the assumption that Truffaut and his compatriots had rendered these big productions and artificial sets obsolete. It's an elegy that, forty years later, seems more than a little premature, as Truffaut himself — who, whatever the merits of his work, hardly ever followed up on the radical promise of his shot-on-the-streets debut — should have understood very well.

Despite this misplaced nostalgia, the film is charming because it's so packed with the director's obvious love of the movies, his affection for actors, stuntmen, script-girls, props crew and makeup artists, even producers. There are countless little affectionate nods to the love of movies. The crew passes "Rue Jean Vigo" on the way to a shoot, there are references to everything from The Rules of the Game to The Godfather, and at one point Ferrand spills out a package full of books, all of them tributes to directors, including Buñuel, Hawks, Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, even a book about Truffaut's fellow New Wave legend Godard, who had taken such a different path through the cinema, and with whom Truffaut had had a rocky relationship for years. (Godard, unsurprisingly, hated the film with its celebration of a studio-bound, craftsmanlike approach to the cinema, and the fallout from their angry letters about this film severed their friendship for good.)


Ferrand is also haunted by a dream of a boy stealing posters for Citizen Kane from a movie theater, a sign of how early in life the love of cinema manifests for these characters, and a nod to the director's continuing fascination with childhood. It's touching, even though Ferrand himself, haunted by dreams of cinematic greatness, hardly seems to be making an ambitious artistic masterpiece like Kane. Maybe Truffaut, whose own career was spotted with uneven, traditionalist love stories of the kind that Ferrand is making here, is suggesting that the charm and the pleasure of movies can be found in even some less satisfying and ambitious examples of the form. Just as Jean-Pierre Léaud's character, the actor Alphonse, is happy to go to the movies to see anything, Ferrand seems happy to be making a movie, any movie, and whether it's good or bad he'll be happy to have made it, to have created something from all this chaos and unpredictability.

Where Truffaut really excels, as always, is in honing in on little moments of searing emotionality amidst the chaos. On this set, everyone is sleeping with everyone, and while much of this plays out as typical bed-hopping farce, there's also genuine pathos in the on-set romances, particularly surrounding the production's lead actress Julie (Jacqueline Bisset) and Léaud's Alphonse. Alphonse spends much of the movie angrily pining for his girlfriend Liliane (Dani), who promises she's his but takes every opportunity to sneak off into a corner with other crew members, and finally leaves the set entirely with a departing British stuntman. Julie, trying to calm Alphonse down and prevent him from storming off the production, winds up going to bed with him, a mistake she instantly regrets when the needy, emotionally immature Alphonse (a very similar character to Léaud's Antoine Doinel) decides that he loves her and calls her husband to tell him so.

After the fallout from this has played out, the subsequent scenes of Julie and Alphonse together are infused with a somber gravity, the unscripted emotions of their private lives seeping into the script, sometimes intentionally as when Ferrand writes some of Julie's private words into the script for her character to say. One scene in particular, in which Julie walks with a candle casting a warm glow onto her features, staring straight ahead at the camera while Alphonse caresses her face, seems loaded with the emotions from the actors' offscreen affair, reverberating with the equally troubled onscreen relationship of their characters, who are supposed to be married.


There is also a great deal of emotional subtext surrounding two actors who are meant to represent the dying studio system, the old way of doing things. Severine (Valentina Cortese) was a once-great actress who now seems to be falling apart, constantly drunk on set and barely able to remember her lines or her cues. (Hilariously, she says she's used to working with Fellini in Italy, where dialogue is generally dubbed, so all she had to do was recite numbers while performing.) Scenes with her are repeatedly reshot, often becoming more and more disastrous with each take as she becomes drunker and more inconsolable over her failures. At one point, she laments that she's growing older, that her contemporary and costar Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is still getting roles as dapper lovers, while she gets cast in thankless parts as the jilted wife. There's a feminist subtext here about the differential treatment of men and women in the movies, but Truffaut, typically, briefly hints at the idea rather than really developing it; he's interested in stories, not ideas, which is always what separated him most decisively from Godard.

Alexandre himself is the other old-guard actor who embodies the film's nostalgia for old ways of doing things. Throughout the film, he's continually relating charming anecdotes about old Hollywood, about the quirks of the star system and the gossipy behind-the-scenes chatter that flows through the movie industry. At one point, as he relates one of these anecdotes, Truffaut's camera drifts in, probing towards a closeup as this actor waxes nostalgic about the glamour and magic of movies and Hollywood stars. Soon after, Alexandre, this symbol of the old era, is dead, in an offscreen car crash that might be a nod to Godard's own tribute to moviemaking, Contempt. Indeed, Contempt is an interesting comparison point in general. Godard's film is seemingly more personal in its focus on the emotional torment and romantic drama that gets woven into the production of a movie — Truffaut's bed-hopping dramas are low-key and tangential compared to the searing power of Contempt's apartment argument centerpiece — but Truffaut's film is personal in a different way. It's personal in the way it communicates a deep love of the movies that goes beyond the particular quality, or lack thereof, of a particular movie, to extend to the whole process of making movies, good or bad, ambitious or straightforward, commercial or arty.

Indeed, this is a film about, and probably for, people who love the movies, and live the movies as well. Alphonse wonders if the movies or life are more important, but for Truffaut — as for Léaud, and in his very different way for Godard too — the movies and life are intimately interconnected. And the movies, which transmute life into art, perhaps have the advantage. In one of the film's best and truest lines, the script-girl Joelle (Nathalie Baye), upon learning that Liliane has run off with a stuntman, says earnestly, "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy." One suspects that Truffaut, for all the romanticism of his movies, feels similarly.

Une belle fille comme moi

François Truffaut's Une belle fille comme moi is a pitch-black comedy of sexual exploitation in which who's doing the exploiting and who's getting exploited is neatly reversed. Camille (Bernadette Lafont) is the subject of a "sociological thesis" on criminal women, being written by Stanislas Prévine (André Dussollier), a hapless professorial type who listens to Camille's jailhouse confessions with great interest. Camille has had a tough life, it seems, always being desired and exploited by the men she meets, who only want her for sex. Camille, of course, relentlessly turns this state of affairs to her advantage, letting these men take her to bed and have their way with her, while ruthlessly exploiting them in turn, taking their money and plotting various criminal acts surrounding her multiple affairs. Camille is in jail, it seems, for the one crime she actually didn't commit, but there's no lack of criminality in this femme fatale. While Stanislas analyzes her in terms of her unhappy childhood and her bad luck in relationships, suggesting various repressed psychological reasons for her bad behavior, Stanislas' good-girl secretary Hélène (Anne Kreis) asks him to consider the possibility that this girl is just a "tramp."

Truffaut's film is torn between feminist empowerment and the confirmation of old clichés about women who are dangerous, man-eating sluts. Camille could easily be seen as a victim, and this is how Stanislas sees her, influenced by her slightly twisted account of her own experiences. In her own version of her story, she's a victim of the attentions of men, who simply want her for her undeniable sexiness, her carnality. Clovis (Philippe Léotard) picks her up and hides her away in his garage, visiting her for sex whenever he can sneak away from his overbearing mother, until Camille, using an age-old form of sexual blackmail, tricks him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. Later, Camille throws herself at the bar singer Sam Golden (Guy Marchand), who she believes will help her with her own singing career — a prospect that seems doomed by her tone-deaf, cat-screech voice — but instead he is, predictably, only interested in her talents in bed. Similarly, a lawyer (Claude Brasseur) claims he can help Camille get a large settlement in a lawsuit, but actually he too just takes her to bed while tricking her into signing blank forms and trying to eke out payments from her.

The film is full of these traditional examples of male exploitation, all these men using Camille for her sexuality while stringing her along in various ways. And yet Camille consistently turns the tables on the men, using them in turn. It's a portrait of mutual exploitation, in which sexuality is a tool, a weapon, a way of getting what one wants: for the men, sex is often an ends in itself, while for Camille it's simply the means by which she gets men under her control. Truffaut's film both embodies these archetypal situations and mocks them, making a farce out of these cynical power struggles between men and women, in which neither side is really interested in the other for anything but base, selfish reasons.


Driving the film is the powerful, irresistible performance of Bernadette Lafont in the central role. Lafont had made her screen debut in Truffaut's early short Les Mistons, and she'd gone on to be the bad girl muse of Truffaut's New Wave contemporary Claude Chabrol in some of Chabrol's earliest films. This film marked her first collaboration with Truffaut in 15 years, and she delivers a ferocious, comic, sexy performance that very much explains why so many men are drawn to her and allow themselves to be destroyed by her. Lafont is always a delightful screen presence, with a distinctive smile that's almost sweet and childlike, if not for the hint of irony that makes her look as dangerous as she is appealing. She's casually, irreverently sexy, well aware of the effect she has on men, even sprawling around in a prison jumpsuit that she leaves tantalizingly half-buttoned, the front hanging partially open to tempt Stanislas into a more-than-professional relationship with his interview subject.

Lafont provides most of the film's laughs, embodying an irrepressible id with every languidly sexy pose, every out-of-key tune, every smirking bit of double entendre. Without her, the film would fall apart, though Truffaut does craft some fun gags, like the fact that the conceited Sam Golden accompanies his sexual conquests with a soundtrack of recorded car race sounds. But it's Lafont who makes the film so much fun, making her shameless tramp of a character both delightfully funny and strangely sympathetic. Truffaut's depiction of the battle of the sexes is rather simplistic and cynical, recalling the sitcom-level clichés about marriage plaguing his Antoine Doinel film Bed & Board, but here at least, Lafont's Camille vivaciously resists such stereotypes at every turn, even as she simultaneously embodies them.

Two English Girls

François Truffaut's Two English Girls is a moving, haunting, subtly powerful film, a drama of alternating repression and release, sexuality and restraint, purity and excess. It is adapted from what seems to be a rather melodramatic novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, who had also written Jules and Jim, another novel about a love triangle that Truffaut had famously adapted. This second consideration of the theme reverses the situation. Where Jules and Jim was about a woman torn between two men, this film, like the novel it's based on, is about a man and the two women he loves. The film is full of melodramatic contrivances and over-the-top emotions: women faint dramatically while reading letters, lovers are torn apart by solemn pacts, there are hysterical pregnancies and illnesses that seem as much psychological and emotional as physiological.

Truffaut alternately revels in these intense emotions and keeps them at arm's length: like the characters, the film and its director seem torn between repression and release, unsure whether to give in fully to the madness and ecstasy and pain of these emotions or to hold back, to retreat into asceticism. The effect is enthralling and ambiguous, rendering these melodramatics affecting and overwhelming when seen, veiled, through the filter of Truffaut's uncertain distance, his hesitance to fully embrace the passions and excesses of this lurid, tragic romance. Claude (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a typically fickle and promiscuous young man when he meets Ann (Kika Markham), a young English girl visiting France. He's drawn to her, but their relationship remains chaste and friendly, even though Claude is undeniably attracted to her; he calls her his "sister" but thinks about grabbing her hand, about kissing her. She takes him to visit her home in Wales, where she introduces him to her sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter), who she's clearly pushing towards Claude despite her own feelings for the young man.

Muriel is built up before her first appearance; at times it seems as though Ann can speak of nothing but her sister, who remains curiously out of view, her absence consistently emphasized in Truffaut's mise en scène. Her closed door, with Muriel sleeping inside, is lingered over. Her empty place setting at the dinner table becomes a point of fixation for Claude. When the girl finally appears, she's sitting stiffly at the table with bandages wrapped around her face, protecting the fragile eyes that she has strained reading. The glimpses that Claude gets of her eye as she lifts the bandage seem to provoke him and arouse his curiosity even more.

Throughout the film, this tension between Claude and the two sisters keeps erupting in different ways, their loves for one another warped and held back by both their own individual moralities and the societal conventions that keep feelings buttoned up. In many ways, the film is about the erosion of a hypocritical and artificial sexual morality that privileges virginity and "purity" in women while condoning the flighty affairs and indiscretions of men. Both of the sisters, in their different ways, strain against this hypocrisy, and it's the women in the film, not the inconstant and indecisive Claude, for whom Truffaut seems to have the most sympathy. Muriel throws herself into religion, finding an outlet for her feelings in devotion to God, denying sensuality and worldliness: at the peak of her devotion, she's moved to confess, in an astonishing journal that she sends to Claude, that she has a weakness for masturbation that was inculcated in her by a childhood lesbian fling with a friend. In spite of that, she is suspicious of the body, suspicious of physicality, and in that she's the opposite of her sister Ann, who initially seems as repressed and proper as Muriel, but soon reveals a more worldly side as she becomes a sculptor, a world traveler and, eventually, Claude's lover.


Their relationship mostly just exposes Claude's hypocrisy, as he introduces her to his ideas of "free love" but is then clearly heartbroken when she takes him at his word and begins seeing a second lover. Claude is a rather callow young man, and Truffaut is unsparing in his depiction of Claude's mistreatment of women. He has romantic ideas, but they mostly seem to be about himself, about the kind of romantic artist's life he wants to lead, rather than about the women whose love he takes for granted and whose passions he awakens and discards.

Truffaut deftly balances the extreme emotionalism of this story, with all its twists and turns and shifting loves, by alternating between bursts of emotional catharsis and stretches in which feelings remain as buttoned up as the exterior the characters present to the world, making it difficult to know what they're thinking or feeling. The effect is striking. Claude's initial time spent with the two sisters in their home is especially spartan and restrained, with Truffaut keeping his distance as Claude vacillates between the two sisters, while Ann is clearly pushing him towards Muriel. It's not clear at all what any of them are truly thinking or feeling, perhaps because they don't know for sure themselves.

This coolness and detachment is especially effective when it's followed by the occasional raw expressions of deeper feelings that punctuate the film. After Claude abruptly breaks off his engagement to Muriel, a decision that barely seems to affect him, Truffaut cuts Claude out of the picture to focus on the suffering of Muriel when she receives his cold-hearted letter. She writes a series of letters in response and never sends them, pouring out her heartbreak and pain on paper and in the film's voiceover, and then, after all this anguish has exploded messily across the film, Truffaut finally cuts back to Claude in Paris, receiving a cool, reserved, polite, understanding letter from Muriel in which she fails to mention any of the pain that he had caused her.

This is the heart of the film, this gap between the surface and the depths, between the polite face presented to the world and the secret turmoil and strong feelings and conflicted desires that lurk underneath. Truffaut deftly balances the two here, and in the process displays a far greater understanding of love, lust and loss than he ever did in Jules and Jim — that the earlier film is acclaimed while this probing, complex work is not is clearly an injustice. The tension is embodied also in the contrast between the film's literary source — the opening credits roll over images of Roché's novel, the pages dense with scrawled notations — and the cinematic, visual splendor of Nestor Almendros' images. The film is both dazzlingly cinematic in its sensuality and its visual beauty, and literary in its frequent reliance on voiceovers that alternately express forbidden feelings or lie to cover up those feelings. Sensual, emotionally rich, ambiguous and ultimately bittersweet, Two English Girls is one of this director's greatest statements on tragically denied love.

The Wild Child

François Truffaut had, from his very first feature, his famous debut The 400 Blows, been very interested in childhood and the experiences of a child in a world governed by adult rules. The director's 1970 film The Wild Child returns to that theme and to the territory of childhood, albeit from a very different angle. Based on a true story, the film deals with a young feral boy (Jeanne-Pierre Cargol) who is discovered in the forest in 1798, running around naked, covered in dirt, fighting and biting and scratching like an animal when he's captured by some rural folk. The boy can't speak, has no understanding of language, and has apparently never experienced the socialization of being around other people. Totally isolated and wild, the boy, eventually dubbed Victor, is a case study for what humanity is like in a natural state, without the accoutrements of language and social behavior that society has created.

Dr. Jean Itard (Truffaut) hears of the boy and decides that he will take Victor into his own home, placing him in the care of his housekeeper Madame Guérin (Françoise Seigner) and trying to teach him language, trying to educate the boy and bring him into human society. It's another opportunity for Truffaut to study the rebellious spirit of a boy's resistance against societal rules: the film is dedicated to Truffaut's one-time child star Jean-Pierre Léaud, and one can easily see in Victor a trace of the same wild, anti-authoritarian qualities that Truffaut so admired in Léaud in The 400 Blows.

And yet The Wild Child possesses very little of those qualities. By this point, just over a decade after Truffaut's debut feature, the director who'd started out shooting rough and raw footage in the streets and decrying the "tradition of quality" cinema that had preceded the French New Wave, had himself been absorbed by that tradition, making films far more polished and conventional than one would have expected after his debut. In contrast to the unpredictable energy and enthusiasm of The 400 Blows, The Wild Child is somewhat dry and smooth, the sharp edges sanded away. Victor is a far wilder figure than Léaud's Antoine Doinel, but the film doesn't really do justice to his wildness, his unconventionality, his complete separation from human society. The result is a film of interesting ideas that's somewhat dull in its execution. Néstor Almendros' stark black-and-white cinematography is crisp and clear, but the film's more restrained tone clamps down on the poetic emotionalism of Truffaut's earlier portrait of uncouth childhood.


Most of the film is narrated by Truffaut's Dr. Itard, reading excerpts from his medical journals about the boy, which contributes to the clipped, clinical tone of this material. The film also moves at a very brisk pace, the long and arduous process of socializing this boy condensed to a highlight reel, complete with old-fashioned iris-in/iris-out effects to transition between scenes, a cutesy flourish that's completely at odds with the no-nonsense rapidity that otherwise characterizes the film. Truffaut makes the process of adapting this boy from a frenzied wild child into an at least superficially civilized kid seem like it happens quickly and incrementally, each new triumph of progress ticked off before moving on. Tellingly, he also cuts the story off before the sad conclusion of the real tale: in real life, Dr. Itard gave up on Victor soon after the events of this film are over, and Victor never progressed beyond the rudimentary fragments of language he's picked up by the end of the film. He spent the rest of his life in an institution, just as Itard's rival doctor had suggested at the beginning of this film. Truffaut elides any hint of this conclusion, choosing to end on a more ambiguous note, Victor having just returned from running away to resume his education with Itard. The ending hints that he could learn more, could actually become socialized and learn to speak, even if he still harbors a longing for the freedom he enjoyed in his former life.

That trace of melancholy about the loss of freedom is the film's strongest element, a cross-current to the unwarranted optimism implied by the ending. Cargol delivers a touching, raw performance, embodied entirely in his face, without recourse to any verbal expression other than a few grunts and a few hesitant words. He seems to long, viscerally and intensely, for the wilds of nature, and though he eventually accepts wearing clothes and eating with utensils and participating in Itard's language and alphabet games, he's still connected to nature. He'd rather stare out the window than watch his instructor. He'd rather run through the fields or stick his head out a carriage window like a dog in a car than play more of Itard's endless matching and memory games. One of the film's more provocative questions is the idea of whether the kid was actually better off not being discovered, if he was happier living wild and free without any attempt to fit in with a society that he'd never even known existed. It's at moments like this that Truffaut's poetic sensibility comes to the fore, in images of Victor running off through a large open field, escaping from the rules and restrictions of a world that he still doesn't fully understand, an image that strongly evokes the closing sequence of The 400 Blows, with Antoine Doinel escaping to the beach.

The Wild Child has periodic moments like this that reveal Truffaut's interest in this story and the ideas he wishes to explore through this wild boy's life. On the whole, however, it's a routine and undistinguished take on an inherently interesting subject, bolstered by its unique resonances with Truffaut's prior work. For a film that raises the question of whether its protagonist might have been better off living his life outside of society, it's a rather staid and conventional work that never truly does justice to the wildness at its core.

Fahrenheit 451

It was a labor of love for François Truffaut to adapt Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451: the director spent years raising the funding, and wrote the English-language script himself (with Jean-Louis Richard) with only limited understanding of English. That accounts for some of the film's strangeness — its dialogue is frequently awkward and its performances stiff — but not even close to all of it. It's a strange work all around, oddly jaunty and surreal, filmed with a jagged modernist style that only accentuates how uneasily it all fits together. It's a weird, and weirdly appealing, film that, for all its unsanded edges, memorably explores Bradbury's themes of knowledge, control, the media and the power of ideas.

Bradbury's story is of course very familiar. In a future society where books are outlawed and firemen hunt down readers, arrest them and burn their books, the fireman Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is abruptly moved to curiosity about the books he's unthinkingly burned for so long. He begins surreptitiously gathering books, compulsively reading, gathering knowledge and rebelling against the order that he'd previously accepted unquestioningly. The film opens with the firemen silently, methodically going about their work. They arrive at an apartment and search it for books, finding them stuffed into every nook, including hidden behind the screen of a non-functioning TV set, a sly joke on the oppositional relationship between mind-numbing TV and stimulating books. The firemen exchange no words as they go about their work, throwing books into a pile to be burned. The burning itself is nearly ritulistic, as Montag dons his protective gear (the footage is reversed; he's actually taking off the costume), grabs a flamethrower, and sets the books on fire while a crowd silently watches. Afterwards, the shot of him taking off his protective suit is replayed, running forwards this time, and by bookending the scene with this same shot, played first in reverse and then normally, Truffaut enhances the subtle weirdness of the sequence as well as the ritualistic nature of the burning. Something seems off about the whole thing, as well it should.

Montag soon realizes that he is not truly happy with this job. He is inspired to question things for the first time by his budding friendship with one of his neighbors, Clarisse (Julie Christie), whose pointed inquiries about his happiness start Montag on his journey into self-doubt and recrimination, as though he'd just been waiting for some excuse to start tearing everything apart. He's certainly not contented in his life, which seems empty and hollow: when his boss asks him what he does on his time off, all he can think of is that he mows the lawn. His wife Linda (also played by Christie) sits at home ingesting one pill after another and watching her televised "family" on the wall screen, stupidly sitting in front of lifeless TV programs that make her feel included in the clumsiest, least convincing fashion.

These TV programs are hilarious and unsettling, with actors periodically turning to face the camera and directly address the viewer by name, asking a question while a red light beeps to signal the need for user input. Truffaut cuts in for jarring closeups of the actor, staring out at the viewer, an angry expression on his face as if he's impatiently awaiting an answer. The funniest part is that the show eventually carries on again no matter what the audience says, but Linda still eagerly plays along, desperate for the aura of importance and participation that these farcical, content-free dramas give her. It's a biting and still relevant satire of television's ability to substitute for real human relationships and the deeper substance of great literature.


The film's style reflects the flatness and emptiness of this society, with gray suburban sprawl and conformity occasionally broken up by splashes of bright primary colors — notably the glistening, foreboding red of the fire engine, which thrusts down the streets towards the next dissenter's home, accompanied by wailing sirens and the pulsing strings of Bernard Herrmann's theme. Truffaut's method of depicting the future is similar to that of his peer Godard's in Alphaville: he simply films the present in such a way as to maximize and emphasize its alienation. Cinematographer (and future director) Nicolas Roeg gives the film a flat style very far from the gloss and shininess with which futuristic societies are generally depicted in the cinema. Rows of identical houses line ordinary suburban boulevards, and people emerge, obediently, only when ordered to by authorities, as they do towards the end of the film, everyone stepping out on their neatly manicured front lawns to help search for the fugitive Montag. Interiors are crisp and modern, the walls bare and boring, the decoration minimal. The fire house itself is the brightest, most colorful location, with its bright red walls and the threatening red blast door from which the fire engine periodically emerges on its grim missions.

Even Truffaut's approach to futuristic technology is straightforward: about the most obvious sign of advanced technology is the firemen's pole, which they can somehow slide up as well as down. This lo-fi special effect — Truffaut simply reverses the film, of course — is one of the film's whimsical but oddly unsettling flourishes. The image of firemen casually gliding up the pole, ascending like angels towards their quarters after a kerosene-soaked day of work, is comical and chilling in equal measure. At a key moment in the film, as Montag becomes alienated from his work and begins to feel the lure of books, technology begins to betray him: the automatic door of his house refuses to open for him, and he finds he cannot slide up or down the pole but must trot, undignified, up and down the nearby spiral staircase, a disused relic of an earlier era much like the books he's tasked with destroying. His boss takes this lack of communion with technology, this symbolic disconnect from the modern era, as a moral failing: "something wrong between you and the pole?" he asks in an insinuating tone.

Something is very wrong, indeed. The film's unsettling vision of the future reaches its horrible climax with a harrowing sequence in which an old woman allows herself to be set afire rather than leave behind the books she loves so much. She stands in the center of a pile of books thrown to the ground by the zealous firemen, turning in circles and smiling beautifically as the flames approach her. The image purposefully evokes the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, another woman destroyed by fire for advancing ideas that challenged the status quo.


In other places, Truffaut achieves disorienting effects through somewhat clumsy, purposefully off-kilter aesthetics. Towards the end of the film, he inserts a laughable special effect shot of four flying men searching for Montag, crudely pasted in front of a landscape. It's the funniest moment of the film, a deliberate middle finger directed at Hollywood sci-fi's obsession with slick effects and glossy surfaces rather than ideas. Elsewhere, Truffaut employs equally shoddy (if less hilarious) rear projection as Montag and Clarisse ride the monorail that takes them out to their suburban neighborhood — the glaringly fake cut-and-paste job of these images recalls Truffaut's idol Hitchcock, who also often exploited the fake quality of these kinds of effects.

Even the stiff, uncharismatic performances add to the film's sense of alienation. Truffaut was especially unhappy with Werner's robotic performance as Montag, but Werner's uninflected line readings and deadened expressions contribute to the sense of a man, and a society, cut off from real feeling, while the actor's thick German accent, along with the grim black uniforms of the firemen, underlines the implied parallels with Nazism. Christie plays two parts here, portraying both of the women in Montag's life, but her performance is similarly flat, and there's little difference between the solipsistic, lazy Linda and the mentally engaged Clarisse. The decision to have the same actress play both parts is suspect in the first place: the point is that the women are very different, that they represent entirely opposite ideas of life and relationships for Montag. Having the same woman play both of them, with little apparent difference in personality, suggests only that for the filmmakers, all women might as well be the same.

Such baffling and offputting aesthetic choices dominate and define Truffaut's take on Bradbury's tale. It's a flawed movie in many ways — even Truffaut himself was unhappy with the affectless performances and clunky dialogue — but it's also a fascinating one. The surreal beauty of the film's imagery is a big part of its appeal: it looks like a garish comedy, is acted like an inscrutable arthouse drama, and is overflowing with sharp-edged satire. Best of all is the poetic ending, which shows Bradbury's "Book People" wandering the countryside outside of town, mumbling the words to the books they've committed to memory, their voices overlapping in a babble of memorized literature. It's a moving and mysterious sequence that provides the film's best tribute to the power of words and the human will to preserve ideas and knowledge at all costs.

Love On the Run

Love On the Run is the final installment in François Truffaut's series of Antoine Doinel films. For this goodbye to his most famous character, and to the series that he inaugurated with his debut feature, Truffaut offered a recapitulation of everything that had come before, a self-conscious trawl through the highlights of Antoine's onscreen life. The film is littered with snippets of other films, scenes from the previous Doinel adventures that keep bubbling up from the thoughts of various characters. These scenes from other movies are presented as memories, an appropriate metaphor since they are memories, presumably, for the audience as well, memories of other movies seen, memories of this character's previous screen adventures, of what he and the rest of the cast looked like nine years ago, or eleven years, or seventeen, or a full twenty years ago, when the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud and the character he played were both only fourteen, a rebellious kid struggling with quarrelsome, inconsistent parents and the strict discipline of school. These films have always been about constantly building on the foundation of the past, and the previous films in the series already contained echoes of the earlier works, references to Antoine's previous adventures and to the audience's memory of his earlier screen incarnations. Here, the device is taken to its logical conclusion, the subtle echoes and parallels replaced by literal — and liberal — quotation.

When Truffaut last checked in with Antoine, in 1970's Bed & Board, he was married to Christine (Claude Jade), and that film ended, after some marital difficulties and infidelity, with the couple's moving reconciliation. It's thus purposefully jarring that Love On the Run opens with Antoine waking up with another woman, Sabine (Dorothée), who has the same slender, nice girl prettiness as Christine. The opening scene, in which the couple playfully banter and spar, until Sabine finally turns off the light and tackles Antoine, suggests that Antoine still hasn't changed, that he's still unsettled, flighty, always looking for something different and winding up with variations on the familiar. He's never quite grown up, and throughout the film he's being dissected, analyzed, his routines and follies mocked and prodded. Everyone has his number down by now: that he's a hopeless romantic until the moment when he gets what he thinks he wants, that he's still haunted by his past and especially by his unhappy childhood, that he has a rather pessimistic view of love and relationships. When the film opens, he's on the verge of getting divorced from Christine, he's embroiled in his latest in a long line of passionate affairs with Sabine, and he's ripe for a reappraisal of his life so far.


The film thus takes Antoine, and those around him, on a trip back through his life as it has unfolded on screen. Characters from Antoine's past return, revisiting earlier moments in his life. Most notably, Antoine again meets his first love Colette (Marie-France Pisier), the girl from the short Antoine and Colette, in many ways the template for all of Antoine's later romantic adventures even though she always resisted his amorous advances. She's now a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, and also mourning the death of her child. Her reunion with Antoine allows her, through reading his autobiographical novel, to reminisce about their pasts and to think about where their lives are headed now. Colette's story in this film parallels Antoine's, to the extent that she becomes a costar with him, two people with a shared past headed along similar trajectories. Just as Antoine struggles in his relationship with Sabine, unable to convey to the girl just how much he loves her, Colette has an on/off romance with the book store owner Xavier (Daniel Mesquich) who, it turns out, is Sabine's brother. Her story and Antoine's thus come together, as both of them are trying to shrug off their pasts and move forward with a new love. As Antoine tries to come to terms with his immaturity and his hang-ups, Colette is still haunted by the death of her child (a detail that's foreshadowed early on but isn't revealed until late in the film) and her uncertainty about her feelings for her lover. This film, mirroring Truffaut's second Antoine story, is about Antoine and Colette, but this time it's not about their failed romance, but about their parallel romances with other people.

This film is refreshing in that it abandons the cheesy humor of the last two Antoine Doinel installments, Stolen Kisses and Bed & Board, focusing instead on the pathos and emotion of Antoine the perpetual man-child, always just on the cusp of adulthood, always learning lessons that, one suspects, he may forget just as quickly. Love On the Run is moving because it provides a cathartic final look at Antoine's life, his mistakes and mishaps, and because it gives him a chance to correct some of those failings. At one point, Antoine runs into Lucien (Julien Bertheau), the man he saw kissing his mother in The 400 Blows, and apparently the man who went on to become her longtime lover. Lucien provides Antoine with a softer, more sympathetic view of his mother, conveying to the touched young man that even if she was never quite able to show it, she did love Antoine. Lucien takes Antoine to his mother's grave, and her face, preserved as she had looked in The 400 Blows, is briefly superimposed into the film, a ghostly projection from the cinematic past providing some closure to Antoine's unhappy childhood.

And also, of course, to Truffaut's, since Antoine's troubled childhood was so thoroughly autobiographical for the director. This is an especially autobiographical film for Truffaut, as evidenced by the liberal quotations from his own previous work, not just the Doinel films but Day For Night (which is evoked by a flashback of Antoine's affair with a woman played by Dani, with situations and dialogue derived from the earlier movie) and Une belle fille comme moi, which Truffaut lightly mocks by having his characters comment on it. He also nods to his fellow New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer by having Christine and Dani's Liliane draw sketches for Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois, thus acknowledging the more adventurous, experimental path traveled by some of Truffaut's New Wave contemporaries while he went on to make mainstream thrillers and comedies and love stories.


Love On the Run, of course, is stuck in the past, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. The film's relentless quotation is often moving, though at times Truffaut goes overboard, especially when he excerpts such long scenes from his previous films that one nearly forgets the surrounding present-day material that prompted these flashbacks. The story of Love On the Run itself is minimal, and the flashbacks often overpower the new material. But Truffaut makes interesting use of his structure, inserting several flashbacks to scenes that didn't exist in the previous films, scenes that might be excerpted from some never-made film that fills in the blanks in between Bed & Board and Love On the Run, like Antoine's affair with Liliane, and the death of Colette's child, and the start of Antoine's romance with Sabine.

The film's final act is especially moving and charming, built on a playful foundation of coincidences and contrivances, like Colette's meeting with Christine, which provides the impetus for one of the film's very best scenes. It's wonderful to see these two women who Antoine loved so intensely converge at the apartment of Antoine's latest love. The two women sit on a bench together and talk, sharing stories of heartache and humor, commiserating about the man they both knew at very different times in his life and in very different ways, laughing about his follies and his idiosyncrasies. It's a delightful and oddly emotional scene, a wry look at Antoine from outside his own self-involved bubble, and the women laugh together, intervene one last time in Antoine's latest romantic folly, and then move on to their own lives without him. This sets up the romantic finale, in which Sabine and Antoine, after reconciling — the way Antoine and Christine had reconciled at the end of Bed & Board — speak into a mirror, delivering lines that might as well be spoken directly to the camera, since they constitute the last word on Antoine and the implicit moral of this final film. It's an acknowledgment that nothing is certain, that life is a constant process of upheavals and changes, and that despite this lack of permanence the best thing to do is to approach each new adventure, each new love, each new career, pretending that it will last forever. What a great way to say goodbye to Antoine.

Bed & Board

Bed & Board is the fourth installment in François Truffaut's series of films about the lovable rogue Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The previous film, 1968's Stolen Kisses, ended with Antoine settling down after some romantic adventures, finally realizing that his longtime on-again-off-again girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade) was the girl for him. This film opens with Antoine and Christine married, living in a small apartment above where Antoine works in a shop dying flowers. The film's opening scenes follow Christine on her errands, initially only tracking her shapely legs below the hem of her skirt, as she goes from shop to shop, correcting the shopowners on her title: she's a "madame," not a "mademoiselle," she says proudly, perhaps proud both that she's married and that she looks young enough to still be mistaken for a young unmarried girl. When Christine returns home soon after, she runs into an old man on the staircase, who lets her go ahead of him so he can ogle her legs, the same way Truffaut's camera had been admiring them just moments before. The point is obvious: Antoine has a young and very desirable wife, and in the subsequent scenes some comic interplay with a slightly older woman who flirts with Antoine establishes that he too is young and desirable. It's a portrait of a happy marriage but already the emphasis on youth and attractiveness sets the stage for some straying outside of this marital and domestic bliss.

The film picks up where the previous Doinel films left off, continuing to examine Antoine as he grows up but doesn't exactly mature. The series that started with Antoine as a young boy, rebelling against his parents and the oppressive confines of school, has now followed him through his teenage romantic troubles and into adulthood and marriage. The previous films are very much present here, in ways both obvious and subtle. During the early scenes, when Antoine is working at the flower shop, he gets a call and answers the phone with an enthusiastic greeting to someone he greets as a mother; for a moment, one wonders if Antoine has at last reconciled with his parents, who were last seen in the first film of the series, The 400 Blows, before he ran away from home. Instead, the woman on the phone turns out to be Christine's mother. As Antoine says, "I don't fall in love with a girl, I fall in love with her whole family." This was a running theme of the earlier films in the series as well. Antoine, who had such an unhappy childhood and such lousy parents, is constantly looking for an adoptive family to call his own. In Antoine and Colette, he'd been as attracted to Colette's loving, kind parents as to the girl herself, and in fact he'd probably spent more time with her parents than with her, as she was constantly dodging him and keeping him at a distance. In Stolen Kisses, he'd formed a similar dynamic with Christine and her parents, and his love for Christine seems to be bound up in his admiration for the happy home life and close relationship she has with her parents, a domestic contentment that had been denied to Antoine (and, by extension, Truffaut) as a boy.


Later, Christine refers to Antoine's ill-fated relationship with Colette, thinking that his admiration for Christine's new glasses is linked to the girl he once loved as a younger man. He corrects her, saying that Colette didn't wear glasses, but in fact his desire for Christine to keep the glasses on in bed hints at something else altogether: a slight restlessness, a desire for something a little different, for a change of pace. Antoine has met a girl, the Japanese girl Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), and he seems to be heading towards an affair. That's the drama that eventually emerges from the film, but it does so only slowly, gradually bubbling up from beneath the light, charming surface of everyday life.

Day-to-day domesticity is the focus here, with lightly humorous scenarios like Antoine and Christine's elaborate and indirect way of getting a forgetful woman to remember to pay for the violin lessons that Christine gives to the woman's daughter. The courtyard of the building where Antoine and Christine live is populated with more eccentric characters, and just as the detective agency of Stolen Kisses provided a forum for little bits of antic comedy and one-liners, this cast of characters serves a similar function here, sprinkling little comedic routines along the fringes of the film. Most of it isn't particularly funny or original, amusing enough to elicit maybe a small smile or a chuckle rather than real laughter. As a comedian, Truffaut's material is rather tame and familiar, and the effect, as at times in Stolen Kisses, is of watching a comedy with very few real laughs. (One exception is Antoine's great response to Christine's musing that she wouldn't breast-feed a child, and another is the bit involving Antoine's insistence that he's reading a newspaper article about "lascivious broads.")

Léaud is such a charming presence that he's fun to watch no matter what the context, and the same goes for Jade. But the sad fact is that each subsequent Antoine Doinel film seems less weighty, less substantial than the last. By this point, the series has become a venue for Truffaut's lightly comic musings on marriage, which are strictly generic and derived from conventional romantic comedy — the best example is the recurring and very unfunny routine with an impatient opera singer and his perpetually late wife, who's always scurrying after him. When that gag is repeated by Antoine and Christine at the end of the film, it's meant to signify that they too have fallen into the routines of marriage, that this is true love. Instead, it's merely sad to see these charming and lively characters subsumed by such lame material. Truffaut's comedic impulses are at the level of a sitcom or a tired old-school comedy, with overly broad caricatured characters: dirty old men, horny housewives, and so on. In comparison to the loose, rich, offhanded humor of The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette — humor that emerged organically from the characters and situations, blended into the varied emotional palette of those films — this staid and prosaic comedic sensibility is a jarring disappointment. Still, there are a few good recurring characters, especially a friend of Antoine's who's constantly asking to borrow money in incrementally greater amounts, always asking to borrow again whatever he already owes.


Truffaut also makes good use of a sinister mystery man (an echo of the mysterious stranger who followed Christine around in Stolen Kisses) who everyone in the neighborhood calls "the strangler." The man turns out to be an innocuous actor, and one night Antoine and Christine see him on TV, doing impersonations of Delphine Seyrig. He starts out performing a parody of Resnais' Last Night In Marienbad, then segues into dialogue from Stolen Kisses, dialogue that Seyrig's older seductress had spoken to Antoine before they went to bed together. As the lines are spoken, Truffaut focuses on a closeup of Christine, smiling and giggling, oblivious to the fact that the actor is reciting lines from one of her husband's previous sexual adventures. It's another of the film's premonitions of the marital discord and infidelity to come.

The thing is, once Antoine has achieved the bourgeois family life he always wanted — the loving parents, the sweet and smart wife, the beautiful baby boy they have halfway through the film — he doesn't really know what to do with it all. He's still a playful and aimless young man, drifting through life. He gets fired from his job as a flower-dyer after screwing up a bouquet with an experiment that fries the flowers, and he stumbles through a case of mistaken identity into a new and even more whimsical job where his sole responsibility seems to be piloting remote-controlled boats around a lake-sized scale model of a harbor. The purpose of this bizarre job is never explained; it's merely a sign of Antoine's continued existence within a quasi-adulthood in which he hasn't quite adopted to marriage, or parenthood, or the responsibilities of a real adult job. As little as Bed & Board resembles the earlier films in the series in terms of tone or style, Antoine himself is still very much recognizable, the impish adolescent of the earliest films in the series still embodied within an older body.

Antoine's continuing uncertainty about what exactly he wants leads to one of the film's best sequences, the penultimate scene at a restaurant where Antoine goes with Kyoko. During the dinner, in between courses, he keeps leaving the table to call Christine on the phone, telling her how unhappy he is and how tired he's grown of Kyoko already. The calls eventually lead to his reconciliation with Christine, a very touching moment in which Truffaut cuts back and forth between closeups of the earnest, upset Antoine and the sweetly smiling Christine, the editing bringing the couple back together even though they remain separated across the phone line. It's a very touching moment, and even if Bed & Board on the whole is too weak and inconsistent to be considered a truly worthy successor to the earlier films in the series, moments like this carry over a measure of the emotional complexity and warmth most closely associated with Antoine Doinel and his adventures.

Stolen Kisses

Stolen Kisses is the third installment in the series of Antoine Doinel tales that François Truffaut inaugurated with his debut feature The 400 Blows. The film opens several years after Truffaut's last visit with Antoine (played as always by Jean-Pierre Léaud), in the short film Antoine and Colette. As with the gap between The 400 Blows and that short, several years are left as an ellipsis between installments, with the effect that each new film in the series is like catching up with an old friend, learning what he's done and where he's been in the intervening years since his last appearance. Since Léaud grows up on screen with his cinematic counterpart, it's also a way of catching up with the actor, seeing how the fourteen year-old boy from The 400 Blows has matured into an independent young man with a vibrant, eclectic life both onscreen and off. When Stolen Kisses opens, Antoine has been in the army for three years, and at the very beginning of the film he's in a military prison, awaiting his release from the army after a troubled career as a private. During his exit interview with a superior officer, the man rattles off a list of Antoine's offenses, including all the bases where he'd gone AWOL, and Antoine smiles at each one, as though fondly recalling happy memories of what he'd done during each of these infractions; a whole history is suggested in those smiles.

It's a loving and playful re-introduction to this familiar character, an assurance that though Antoine has grown older he's still a charming misbehavior, a defiant young man with little tolerance for authority. Even more telling, perhaps, is what precedes this scene, an opening image which on the surface has no real connection to the rest of the film. During the credit sequence, Truffaut films the building that housed the then-closed Cinémathèque Franèais, which at the time of the making of this film was embroiled in the Langlois affair, when the firing of Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque's longtime director (and mentor to the Cahiers du cinema group of filmmakers and critics), triggered student protests and riots demanding his reinstatement. Truffaut and Léaud were both on the frontlines of these protests, with the latter making fiery speeches on Langlois' behalf in front of that very building. Some text during the titles of Stolen Kisses dedicates the film to Langlois, but the film itself has only the most tenuous of connections to Langlois or to the protests and politics bubbling up around him at the time. The protests over Langlois' departure from the Cinémathèque would eventually seem like a precursor to the broader student riots of May 1968, but these political questions linger only at the edges of the film.

The Langlois affair is mentioned explicitly, once, by the parents of Antoine's sometime-girlfriend Christine (Claude Jade), who describe it in vague and slightly bemused terms, reflecting the generation gap between the older generation and those who, like Truffaut and Léaud and their associates, grew up with the Cinémathèque and with Langlois' tutelage. But Antoine and Christine are equally abstracted from the events; Christine gets off from school when boycotts break out at her university, and she uses it as an unexpected vacation, going skiing with her friends. Antoine, for his part, is totally unaware of any of it. Later, Christine mentions to him that some of her friends are involved in protests, but Antoine, absorbed in his job, barely listens, and that's the extent of the film's engagement with the political upheavals sweeping France at the time. It's a curious decision, this abstraction from the politics of the time, especially since both the director and the star were so heavily involved in the events in their personal lives. It's as though Truffaut is asserting, with his casual integration of the politics at the fringes of a politically content-free film, that he intends to keep his cinema somewhat separate from the upheavals of the time — a pointed rejection of the very different path taken by Jean-Luc Godard, and the increasing split between the two filmmakers and former friends. Truffaut's film makes a token nod to the politics, to the concerns that so occupied both Truffaut and Léaud off the set. Godard could not make such a separation between his politics, his life and the films he made, but Truffaut, it seems, could.


Instead, Stolen Kisses is largely concerned, like Antoine and Colette, with Antoine's romantic adventures, in this case especially his on/off relationship with Christine, with whom he has a relationship that mirrors his friendship/affair with Colette, even including his closeness with the girl's mother and stepfather, who are like surrogate parents for the adrift young man. In addition to the relationship with Christine, the film also traces Antoine's visits to prostitutes (including his very funny encounter with a pair of them early on) and his fascination with Fabienne (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful older woman who's the wife of the shoe store owner Tabard (Michael Lonsdale). He meets this latter couple while working as a detective for a private investigation firm, one of several jobs he takes during the course of the film. Antoine is an inept detective, perhaps because his example is the movies: in one of the film's funniest scenes, Antoine, excited over his new job, follows a random woman on the street and acts so suspicious that she detects him almost instantly. His exaggerated cinema detective routine — hiding his face behind a newspaper, ducking behind trees, weaving back and forth behind his chosen target — is derived entirely from the language of detective films, with a heavy parodic spirit in the way he executes these maneuvers.

Indeed, Stolen Kisses is a comedy in a way that, for all the humorous moments in both The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette, neither of the first two Antoine Doinel films were. This film often seems to be built around sketches, bits of comedic business like Antoine's introduction to the detective Henri (Harry-Max), in which the detective cons Antoine (in an short-lived job as a hotel desk clerk) into helping him get proof for an adultery case. The scene is pure antic slapstick, albeit somewhat clumsily staged, with jarring cuts and a kind of forced cheerfulness as the woman in the case sits in bed topless and the men yell at each other. Truffaut's comedy often seems forced and off-key like this, particularly in the scenes involving one of the detective agency's other clients, an obviously gay man who enlists the agency to track down his former boyfriend, a magician. Truffaut makes the gay man an object of mockery, emphasizing the way the agency's owner sees right through the man's explanation that he wants them to find his "friend." Later, when the detectives tell the man that his "friend" is now married with a pregnant wife, he loses it, assaulting the detectives and eventually getting carted away. (The best part of that scene, though, is Léaud's possibly unscripted sudden fall off camera, tripping over an unseen obstacle in the midst of the chaotic scene.) The gay man provides comedic relief, his heartache over his breakup an object of derision and implicit mockery — a stark contrast to the treatment of Antoine's naïve romanticism and obsession with his amour du jour in this series.

The film is more compelling in its comedy when it comes to Tabard, the shoe store owner who hires the agency, he says, because even though he's a very successful businessman and, he thinks, a decent guy, he believes that everyone in his life, from his employees to his wife, actually hates him. Even in his first interview, he gives a first hint as to his true character, casually letting slip his racist sentiments even while insisting that he doesn't discriminate against anyone in his store — even Arabs and Chinamen, he says, not realizing that he's revealing more clues than he thinks. It gets better. Antoine gets a job in Tabard's store to observe the store owner's (nasty) interactions with his employees, and becomes obsessed with Tabard's wife Fabienne. Tabard is a jerk with his wife, too, and it's obvious that she looks at him with barely veiled contempt and annoyance. When Tabard says that he once painted houses, his wife, with a girlish smile, jokes, "like Hitler." Tabard slams down his fork, obviously angry, but the way he phrases his response, it almost sounds like he thinks she insulted, not him, but Hitler, by calling the dictator "a housepainter." "Hitler painted landscapes," he says indignantly, with the air of a man tired of hearing his hero slandered. The portrayal of Tabard as a silly fascist who wonders why nobody likes him is the film's richest vein of comedy.


In a way, the structuring of Stolen Kisses as a comedy robs the film of the depths conveyed by the earlier Antoine Doinel stories. In this film, Antoine is almost a bystander in his own story, observing the action and the weird characters around him but staying curiously uninvolved — which also works as a metaphor for the film's lack of political involvement. Antoine is almost a placeholder in this film, the strong emotions he displayed in the earlier films somewhat dimmed, held at a distance. The film is about Antoine's slow realization that he has to finally grow up, and in the final scene — having reconciled with Christine and proposed to her after a fling with Fabienne — he comes face to face with a romantic, passionate young man who wildly declares his love to Christine, who calls him "crazy." Antoine, one senses, would recognize himself in this fiercely romantic and impetuous man, and as Antoine walks away with Christine at the end of the film, disappearing down a tree-lined boulevard, he's leaving behind that iteration of himself. It's a powerful conclusion, but not one that's organically developed in the rest of the film, as Antoine simply shuffles from one job to another with little indication of what he's feeling on a deeper level, beyond his desire for one woman or another.

Even so, the film is at times charming, and the eccentric characters who populate the detective agency provide a real source of entertaining diversions. The heart of the film, though, is Christine, and Claude Jade's sprightly performance, radiating girl-next-door charm and poise, makes her a compelling character. When she decides she wants Antoine back, and devises a simple ruse to bring him back to her, the mischievous smile on her face communicates everything one needs to know about her. Truffaut also stages a lovely scene in which the reunited lovers communicate entirely in short notes to one another, culminating with Antoine proposing to her and declaring his love, all accomplished silently, just watching the faces of the actors as they play this little game of non-verbal love. Delphine Seyrig's performance as Fabienne — which climaxes with an absolutely wonderful and meandering speech she gives to a silent, slightly frightened Antoine as she seduces him — is also great, and in many ways the two women overshadow Antoine, and Léaud, in his own movie.

It's sometimes a problem that Antoine seems peripheral to his own story, but the emphasis on the two women he loves restores some of the energy and richness that's otherwise lost here. The film is sometimes funny (Antoine trying out for a job as a stock boy, ineptly wrapping a package and getting the job because the owner wants a detective in house) and has clever flights of fancy like the sequence where a letter is tracked from the post office through the underground pneumatic tubes of Paris to its eventual destination, but on the whole it's an uneven third visit with Antoine Doinel, not nearly as satisfying or consistent, or as deep, as the first two entries in the series.

Antoine and Colette

The short film Antoine and Colette, originally part of an anthology film called Love At Twenty, was François Truffaut's first sequel to his debut The 400 Blows, picking up the story of the young juvenile delinquent Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) three years after the events of that film. The film opens with a voiceover that catches the audience up on the intervening years of Antoine's life: in and out of juvenile detention, eventually landing on his feet with a job at a record company, finally getting the independent life that he'd longed for as a child. The early images of Antoine waking up alone in his own apartment and then stepping out on the balcony are the image of freedom. Truffaut's camera leaves the apartment to capture Antoine's apartment building in a long shot, zooming in on the young men as he steps out onto the balcony, overlooking the street, stretching in the morning air, a vision of freedom and independence, a young man on his own in the city.

Truffaut then further establishes the continuity between his earlier film and this one by having Antoine meet with his old friend René (Patrick Auffay), and the two friends reminisce about some of their adventures from The 400 Blows. These memories infiltrate the film in an especially cinematic way, a variation on the old iris in/out of silent film, as the frame constricts on the present-day Antoine and René to make room for their memories, in the form of a scene chopped out of the first film, which then expands to fill the whole frame. It's a very poignant moment, as the scene from the first film is nostalgic on multiple levels: for Antoine and René, remembering their childhood friendship, but also for the audience, remembering the film they'd loved so much and the playful, loose spirit that infused it, and remembering too the way these actors, now young men, had looked just a few years before, like little boys playing at being men, smoking cigars and drinking wine and gambling, then clumsily trying to hide all the evidence when a parental authority came in.

With the characters re-introduced in this essentially nostalgic way — nostalgic already for the cinema of a few years earlier, for the boyhood awkwardly blossoming into puberty and manhood — the remainder of the short concerns Antoine's unsuccessful attempts to woo Colette (Marie-France Pisier), a girl he meets at a concert. When Antoine finally gets the courage to talk to her after watching her from afar at multiple concerts, Truffaut highlights the couple, isolating them from the rest of the audience with a tight frame that only reveals Antoine and Colette, with the rest of the frame black as though everything else in the room has ceased to matter — to the besotted Antoine, at least. Reading between the lines, however, even more than this story of young love, the film is actually about Antoine's yearning for the family he'd lost, the happy family that in a sense he'd never had.


Colette rejects Antoine's advances at every turn, treating him like a friend or, more poignantly, like a brother. Indeed, Colette's parents immediately take a liking to Antoine, and at one point the voiceover says that they all but "adopted" the young man, a pointed turn of phrase considering Antoine's status as a near-orphan, with no parents who care about him. (It's touching, too, in light of Truffaut's own quasi-parental relationship with the young actor; there was more than a little of both Truffaut and Léaud in Antoine.) Antoine had been a ward of the state, and now he was on his own, and though he gets nowhere with Colette, one senses that perhaps what he really wants is not necessarily her but this family. They're so well-adjusted, so friendly, never arguing the way Antoine and René's parents had argued; there's quite a contrast between the family scenes in this film and the families of The 400 Blows.

When Antoine tells Colette's parents that he'd run away a lot as a child, they joke about it with Colette in a way that suggests they know that she'd never do that, and she seems to know that she'd never want to. They sit around the table in the family's apartment, talking and laughing, and Antoine's giggling at everything they say subtly recalls his one happy memory with his own family, a car ride from The 400 Blows when he rode in the back between his parents, watching them happy for once, flirting and joking with one another, one big happy family. This scene is an echo of the earlier one, another glimpse of a happy family for the independent Antoine.

There are other suggestions that Antoine is still yearning for the happy childhood he never had. When Colette says it must be so wonderful to be on his own, he seems ambivalent, shrugging and saying, "it depends." The conversation takes place on a dark street as the pair walk home together, and it's too dark to see the young man's face, but one senses the subtle melancholy in his voice, the sense that he's gotten what he always wanted and still isn't quite happy. This sense runs throughout the whole film, a cross-current to the emphasis on Antoine's attempts to woo Colette. The result is that, though the unrequited romance is the ostensible subject of the film, its real thematic depths reside not in the heartache of young love but in the adolescent longing for family and stability, the mingled fears and excitement of being out on one's own in the world.