Word: truffauts
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ENCHANTING is an adjective usually reserved for miniature music boxes and grand-children. When used in reference to movies, one expects either Walt Disney or a charming but minor story of middle-aged love, a la Frank Gilroy's Once in Paris. But Francois Truffaut's new film Love on the Run is undeniably enchanting. In fact, it's perfect. Truffaut has created a flawless film which not only belongs to the genre of french romantic comedy, but which will be the yardstick other such films are measured against...
Indeed, Romance is awash in cinematic jokes and asides: Hill laces the action with references to Hollywood lore, his own past hits and Truffaut's Antoine Doinel movies. The film's portrait of young love may be touching, but its most moving moments celebrate love of a different kind: the passion that movie professionals, both young and old, have for their craft...
Antoine may be a child, but there is nothing childish about the films in which he appears. Through this character, Truffaut has found the perfect means for exploring some profound dilemmas of the heart. In Antoine's restlessness the director sees love's unpredictability, its evanescence, its incompatibility with the rude dailiness of life. Truffaut believes 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...
Love on the Run is not among the best, but it has its moments. Truffaut picks up Antoine, now a novelist, on the eve of his divorce from Christine (Claude Jade), whom he courted in Stolen Kisses and married in Bed and Board (1970). Antoine is already in hot pursuit of new prey. As usual, nothing in the film turns out as first expected. By the t'me it is over, Truffaut has cagily shifted the audience's perspective on all his characters. A couple who appear to be lovers turn out to be siblings. Antoine...
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...