Word: doinel
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...happy news about Love on the Run, Frangois Truffaut's fifth autobiographical Antoine Doinel movie, is that Antoine still refuses to grow up. Though the director's alter ego has come far since he first appeared 20 years ago in The 400 Blows, he remains a hopelessly restless, love-hungry kid. Antoine will badger, beg and lie to win a woman's affection, only to discover over and over that his hunger is not satiated by each new conquest. As a pal tells him this time, "All you care about is boy meets girl; from there...
...true romance can last only as long as a fleeting, stolen kiss, but, even so, he is not a weary pessimist. Each time Antoine (the ever boyish Jean-Pierre Leaud) picks himself up off the floor for another doomed fling, it is a victory of the spirit. The best Doinel movies, The 400 Blows and Stolen Kisses (1968), are among the most hilarious and disturbing film comedies ever to chart the vicissitudes of human passion...
This is classic Truffaut technique, but despite uniformly vivid performances, the film never attains its promised emotional complexity. The major difficulty is the director's determination to turn Love on the Run into a retrospective of the entire Doinel cycle. Not only do old players reappear, including Marie-France Pisier of Love at 20 (1962), but so do clips from the other films. It may be a laudably ambi tious notion to refract the past through the present in such purely cinematic terms, but there is too much material to be digest ed in one movie. Too often Truffaut...
...like Cinderella Liberty, is a romantic work, but in this case it's romance with a lot of heart and brain behind it. Francols Truffaut, working with Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, has created a beautiful motion picture that is in many ways more rewarding than the Antoine Doinel series. Mermaid is playing with another Truffaut flick, The Bride Wore Black starring Jeanne Moreau. This one is relatively lightweight, but it's still an eminently enjoyable bit of story-telling. Shows begin...
...getting hit by a sledgehammer--pure silly bliss. This is an okay emotion to have visited upon you, and this is a picture not to be missed. Playing at the Brattle with Stolen Kisses until Tuesday. The second show on the bill is a Truffaut tale about young Antoine Doinel; it's more incisively funny than the Malle film but not nearly as purging...