Word: doinel
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...film business today is that Truffaut is very close to burned out. A bank of admiring critics are scavenging his previous films for motifs to expand on. Truffaut himself has reportedly been undergoing psychoanalysis. He has even spoken, perhaps facetiously, of making another film in the Antoine Doinel series, (starring Jean-Pierre Leaud) in which the "alter-ego" hero tells in analysis what his director has done to him. In Day for Night, the mercurial Leaud character is joined by the director himself, playing a director. The separation is perhaps a sign of Truffaut's gropings for a new directorial...
AUTEUR THEORIES OF film have always been closely linked to a study of the expressive self, and for Truffaut the Doinel films, The Wild Child, with its version of natural man, and Fahrenheit 451, a view of the individual in a repressive dystopia, are all tied to this theme. Now he has made what seems to be seem kind of auteur ultimate: a film where the director is himself the individual studied. Comparisons with Fellini's 8 1/2 are hard to avoid, and they are not to the advantage of Truffaut's film. Truffaut has even borrowed Fellini's peculiar...
Leaud began his career at age fourteen playing Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows the first installment of Truffaut's autobiographical trilogy. He later continued the role in two more episodes and was consistently adept in his portrayal of Truffaut's shy and awkward screen persona. For the first third of Two English Girls. Leaud offers one more variation on that character. But as the film progresses, Claude matures, grows callous then regretful, and Leaud's performance becomes unconvincing. "I look old," says a pensive Claude toward the end of the film, but it is only wishful thinking. Jean Pierre Leaud...
THIS final defeat is decidedly different from the denouements of the other Doinel pictures. The 400 Blows ended with Antoine on the beach, granted at least the illusion of freedom and much of the hope; there was the possibility that the cruel prison of his youth now belonged largely to the past. When Antoine and Christine finally get together at the end of Stolen Kisses, we were allowed the luxury of betting on their marriage as a successful vehicle for maintaining the esprit of the romantic, non-confining Paris Truffaut lovingly displays throughout that film...
Truffaut, however much we may love him, demonstrates the impossibility of our affection once and for all in his new film. He dashes not only the small hopes left to us by the other Doinel pictures, but also those allowed by Jules and Jim, Shoot the Piano Player and Mississippi Mermaid. We should have known it was coming, for our adoration of this director has always been based on our sense of his understanding that love is not sweet, simple and easy no matter what its appearances. Embracing in a lobby or a park or a church will solve nothing...