(1970; French) As with most jokes, I forget the contents of most movies after several years (one reason for my writing these reviews for future reference), even those I most enjoyed, allowing me to enjoy the story on second viewing, often on another level of understanding. This romantic comedy is the next to the last in the series of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) films from director/writer François Truffaut, which began with The 400 Blows and includes Stolen Kisses.

Antoine and Christine (Claude Jade) are married. While she teaches music lessons in their flat on the upper-story above a restaurant and the flower shop for which Antoine works dyeing carnations, he observes his neighbors, such as Ginette (who offers hints of being available for seduction) and a man who has confined himself to his room for 25 years, until Marshal Pétain receives an honorable burial. Another couple resides next door, Italians, Silvana and her imperious husband, an opera singer, who hurls her coat and purse onto the stairs when he's furious with her for being late. A "creepy" stranger recently having taken a flat one evening appears on television.

Antoine says he married the attractive bourgeois daughter (who admires Nureyev) of Lucien and his wife for their being her parents and because they're not his. Impish, naïve, selfish, childish (insouciance alternating with peevishness), fond of practical jokes and wordplay, Antoine at his in-laws' for dinner excuses Christine's having forgot Mother's Day, saying it was a Nazi invention anyway; he teases Christine about her breasts having different appearances, suggesting she give them names, Laurel and Hardy or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

After his experiment to produce an absolute red carnation fails, Antoine applies for a job with an American hydraulics firm, looking for someone fluent in English; a misunderstanding associates Antoine with a letter of recommendation for another candidate, resulting in an interview in which the American interviewer struggles to discourse in French while Antoine responds in elegant English. His job is child's play, operating by remote control miniature boats inside a model harbor.

"Stung by a mosquito," Christine becomes pregnant and delivers a son, whom she wants to name Ghislain; but Antoine, dismissing that name as snobbish, insists on Alphonse (a peasant's appellative, Christine complains), boasting to everyone of his fatherhood and that his son will become the next Victor Hugo. At nights Antoine works on another manuscript for a novel.

A feeling of estrangement develops between Christine and Antoine; she accuses him of secretly desiring Silvana for her big bosom. At work he's introduced to Kyoko (Hiroku Berghauer), the pretty daughter of a Japanese client, and then takes advantage of her dropping her bracelet into the water, later retrieving and returning it to her personally at her apartment where she initiates their affair. When Christine discovers Antoine's infidelity, she greets him in the costume and make-up a geisha girl.

However, when her parents come over unexpectedly for dinner to see their grandson, Christine temporarily repairs their separation for the sake of appearances. After she refuses to allow Antoine to sleep in bed with her - "I like things to be clear" - he moves into a hotel and continues to see Kyoko, though sitting on the floor and eating with chopsticks becomes uncomfortable; remorsefully Christine admits to Silvana that she handled things badly by being scared and panicky.

Visiting Alphonse, Antoine tries to blame his confusion and misconduct on the effort he's been putting into completing his novel; Christine rebukes him, saying he shouldn't use art to settle accounts. At a brothel Antoine encounters Lucien, who recommends the practice to keep accord at home.

The epilogue, a year later, takes this poignant depiction of a troubled love story into a comic punchline. "I hate things to end," says Antoine. So a conclusion can be seen nine years later in Love on the Run.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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