I've watched a lot of foreign films over the past six months of my life. Doing so has afforded me the opportunity to gleam a very important observation. You know, the cultures of the world all have their own things in the entertainment sphere. America is a TV culture. Italy has opera. The British are all about the stage. France has cinema. Not movies, not film, cinema - the use of the moving picture as an art form. French films can be pretentious as all get-out, but they're honest and have aims that go beyond cashing in on your nostalgia. For that reason alone, I'm all about me some French cinema.
Of all the films in the 30 Flicks project, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows was definitely the one that surprised me the most with how much I enjoyed it. I already did a full-length review that can be read here, but I'll do a brief refresher. The film is the story of 13-year-old Antoine Doinel, a problem child before John Ritter had ever heard of such a thing who is constantly bucking his authoritarian teachers and his tyrannical mother. The film ends with Doinel being sent away to a military academy in an ending that is both bleak and hopeful. The movie, considered one of the best in cinema history, is perfectly self-contained. I was shocked, however, to learn that the character of Antoine Doinel would appear FOUR more times, all in projects directed by Truffaut and all starring Jean-Pierre Leaud as the main character. When it was all said and done, we would pay witness to some 20 years in the life of Antoine, beginning three years after The 400 Blows with a short film that was part of an anthology called Love at Twenty.
At a lean and mean 32 minutes, Antoine & Colette is the story of the first love and infatuation that the now 17-year-old Antoine has in life. As the story begins, Antoine has managed to free himself of both the military academy and his parents, supporting himself by working as an LP manufacturer. The object of his affection is music student Colette (Marie-France Pisier). The story contained here is essentially the eternal struggle of the male stuck in the friend zone, as Antoine writes love letters to Colette and dotes on her hand and foot in an attempt to get her to fall in love with him. Alas, she never does. This isn't a story that you can watch and feel all warm and fuzzy about afterward, but it is no doubt effective at the message that it tries to convey. Sometimes, life can kick you in the gut, and how you deal with that determines your strength as a person.
Launch forward six years to 1968. Antoine Doinel is back, no longer in black and white and now in living color, for Stolen Kisses. As the film opens, Antoine is being dishonorably discharged from the Army due to frequently being AWOL (not a shock considering just how much skipping school he did as a kid). Boiled down to its bare essentials, this movie is a screwball workplace comedy, as the suddenly unemployed Antoine goes from job to job to make ends meet. He gets fired on no less than three separate occasions throughout the deft 90-something minute running time, finally finding some semblance of stability working as - of all things - a private detective.
It is with this film that the series focusing on Antoine as an adult finds it focus - the character's winding and very prolific love life. As the film begins, he has a love interest of sorts in Christine Darbon (the gorgeous Claude Jade, who resembles a more innocent version of Catherine Deneuve), violinist who seems simultaneously very hot and very cold toward Antoine. While romancing Christine, he becomes very enamored with his boss's older wife, who is flattered by the attention and readily seduces the younger man. Taking in the film, I couldn't help but compare it to The Graduate, which has a similar story on paper but left me very cold - mostly because I found Dustin Hoffman's character to be insufferable. Antoine Doinel is very similar to Benjamin Braddock in theory, but he is infinitely more likable, more humorous and at times downright goofy. As the film comes to a close, with Antoine and Christine engaged and ready to face the future together, I was eager to watch more of this quirky character.
Just two years later, Bed and Board would be released and expand on the themes explored in Stolen Kisses. With a much shorter gap between stories, this one has much more direct continuity with its predecessor, with both Leaud and Jade lending their considerable chemistry to the characters as they face the rigors of a new marriage. As the title implies, the couple are now married, living a charmed life in a tiny apartment. Antoine runs a flower stand and works on his still-unfinished novel, while Christine gives violin lessons to children. Truffaut does his best to convey the routine of married life in the once-again amazing 90-odd minutes that the film unspools in. This is presented with perfect clarity in the repeated scenes of Antoine and Christine in bed, with both characters usually engrossed in reading material and occasional bits of humorous dialogue peppered in.
Those scenes, with their funny level of sameness, also clue the audience in that there is trouble in paradise lurking just under the surface. After the couple welcome a baby into the world, Antoine becomes enchanted by a mysterious Japanese girl (Hiroko Berghauer) who he eventually begins an affair with. There is a bit of dialogue where Antoine describes the affair to the heartbroken Christine that his new lover is like a whole new world, bringing home the central theme of Bed and Board for the audience. There is also commentary here about how a married couple having children only magnifies what lurks under the surface for the parents, both good and bad.
Nine years would pass between Bed and Board and the follow-up (and final) film, 1979's Love on the Run. 20 years after first playing the character, the age is starting to show on Jean-Pierre Leaud's face, a physical truth that makes him even more endearing. As the film begins, he is waking up with his new lover Sabine (French singer Dorothee). Antoine (who is now a published novelist) and Christine are in the process of finalizing their divorce, as their reconciliation at the conclusion of Bed and Board turned out to be only temporary. The dissolution of this union is oddly amicable and almost heartwarming in a way, with Jade's singular smile serving as her stoic facade against the roller-coaster ride that Antoine taken her on.
I was admittedly a bit worried after the first 20 minutes of the film that Truffaut did not have a fresh direction for the character of Doinel to go. The script salvages itself with the sudden reappearance of Colette, still played by Pisier and more gorgeous than ever. Through a series of flashbacks to the earlier films and some very Citizen Kane-esque nonlinear storytelling, we see the complicated series of events that led to the divorce and the relationship between Antoine and Sabine. As told to Colette by Antoine, of course. There is much more than we initially thought going on here, both internally and externally. The story of Love on the Run is one of fate and the wisdom that comes with advanced age, with a finale that feels absolutely perfect precisely because it is so low-key and understated.
This is a very entertaining, very unique series of films. It starts with The 400 Blows, a not-quite deadly serious but still drab and dour exploration of a disaffected youth rebelling against his admittedly very poor parental figures. The ensuing films could not possibly be any more different, but they are all very much a logical extension of the Antoine character from the time we first met him. Francois Truffaut gives us three romantic comedy films that took the bold step of presenting them from the male perspective, which is very much rooted in infatuation and sexuality. He amazingly did not take a side in this, merely showing us the very troubled love life of a once-troubled child and letting the audience make up their own mind. A level of impartiality that modern film-makers could definitely learn a thing or two from.
I think the execution and the little character moments that each film gives Antoine is the key here. In the hands of a lesser story-teller, Antoine could be an almost unbearable character. He isn't unbearable; he isn't a whiner like Benjamin Braddock or Woody Allen's self-insert character in all of his films. Instead, he is smart, articulate and boasting of a robust sense of humor. Despite seeing the worst that this character has to offer, he is nonetheless endearing. Watching the films in sequence, I REALLY wanted Antoine to have a happy ending and would have left severely disappointed if he did not get one. Spoiler alert, I didn't walk away from the final film disappointed. Should you seek these movies out as I did (and don't mind reading subtitles), I don't think you will either.
Rating time (out of ****):
The 400 Blows - **** (which was upgraded from *** 1/2 after rewatch)
Antoine & Colette - positive
Stolen Kisses - *** 1/2
Bed and Board - ***
Love on the Run - ***
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