Love On the Run (L'amour en fuite)

LOVE ON THE RUN (L'amour en fuite)     B             

France  (94 mi)  1979  d:  François Truffaut

Caresses photographed on my sensitive skin
You can dump ’m all, moments, pictures, what you will
There’s always transparent adhesive tape
To square all those torments back into shape

We were that splendid shot: the smart lovers
We set up home, happiness for two, yeah right
Soon enough shards cut and gash and blood spurts
There goes the crockery on the tiled floor

[Chorus]
We, we, we didn’t make it
Peewee, tears down your cheek
We part and there’s nothing we can explain
It’s love on the run
Love on the run

I slept, a child came up in lace frills
Away, then back, then shifty, that’s the swallows’ drill
Hardly have I moved in I leave the two-room flat
Whatever your name is, Lily, Clare or Brad

All my life is a running after things that won’t stay put
Sweet-scented girls, roses, posies of tears
My mother also put behind her ear
A drop of something that smelled just the same

—Alain Souchon, L'Amour en fuite (Love On the Run), L'amour En Fuite （Love On The Run) - L'amour En Fuite - YouTube (3:33)

In the concluding episode of the 5-film Antoine Doinel series, very much a complexly conceived, character driven saga that immerses you in the character’s fleeting thoughts and memories, what’s immediately apparent is the use of flashback sequences, which, with few exceptions, are little more than edited footage from the earlier films, while adding a new thread that combines several of the characters.  While all the other films play perfectly well when viewed alone, as these were never originally planned as a series, this is the only one that deliberately contains the connecting threads of the four previous films.  If separated over time, as these films were made in an era prior to DVD videos, where the only way you could see these films was in theatrical screenings that would likely be spread out over time, and not necessarily in order, where you literally live with the characters in your head for years, so the audience probably appreciated the effort made by the director to combine elements of all the previous stories, bringing the viewer up to date on the latest developments of Antoine Doinel’s storied life.  But if viewed in succession, very much in tune with the modern approach, this feels like an unnecessary recap of events, heavy on the recurring film clips, nearly twenty minutes in a 94-minute film, which only feel redundant.  Outside of the heartbreakingly fierce originality of Jean-Pierre Léaud’ s child performance in the original The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), one of the single most compelling characters of the entire series has always been the assured maturity and remarkable independence of Marie-France Pisier as Colette in Antoine and Colette (1962).  By now a co-writer with director Jacques Rivette of Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont ... (1974), one of the most uniquely creative films ever made, Pisier is also a co-writer and featured star of this film as well, albeit 17-years later.  It’s interesting that she has aged in parallel fashion alongside Antoine and has become a respectable lawyer.  What Pisier has always brought to the table was a dominating personality, where she’s actually been more interesting to watch than the rather feeble exploits of Antoine, who since the rebellious first film has largely drifted through his life as a dawdler and a daydreamer.       

It would be fair to say that the earliest first three films through Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés) (1968) represent the most intensely autobiographical period, where the predominate themes explored are a result of Truffaut’s own dysfunctional family experience, where his missing father and indifferent mother gave him the impetus to revolt from authority and run away from the trouble that always seemed to follow, where he never seems capable of taking responsibility or sustaining a committed and loving relationship.  Oscillating between elation and despair, he continues to idealize women, most likely something that developed from his voracious reading habits as a child, where the lack of role models in his own life, getting expelled from several schools, furthering his social isolation, and the need for both his missing mother and the woman of his dreams left him most desperately in need of being loved, where often the only place he could find worthy representatives was conjuring up images in his imagination from the works of fiction that he read.  It is this sense of rebellious outsiderism that most interests us about the young Antoine, a young man who has difficulty finding his place in the world, who lacks the social graces, whose youthful exuberance makes him wildly excited about an idea only to forget about it a short time later, whose loneliness is so deeply etched in his personality that he becomes an actor in public continually guarding his inner feelings, often expressed through a clownish humor, where Jean-Pierre Léaud is perfectly emblematic of that restless cauldron of anxiety assigned to protect his deepest unrest, where in his mind he always sees a way for everything to work out perfectly, but when confronted face to face with reality, his mind works simultaneously in forward and reverse, having difficulty with the present, as he’s a poor substitute for what he had in mind, often making a fool of himself with aggressively inappropriate behavior, driving away the very thing he’d hoped would offer him salvation.  In place of the real love he hungers for, he becomes something of an emotional thief, thriving on the affections of others, ingeniously creating circumstances of momentary bliss, stealing kisses, quick sexual excursions, forgotten promises of love in the night, and any other means to attract attention, either the good kind or the bad kind, where he would forever remain important and significant, and most of all alive.    

 

Once Antoine gets involved in a marriage with Christine (Claude Jade) in Bed & Board (Domicile conjugal) (1970), a woman Truffaut actually fell in love with and even got engaged, but never married, she is portrayed in the series as a virtuous girl that remained a virgin up until her marriage, but can’t put up with Antoine’s practice of deceit and philandering ways, yet she still loves him and demonstrates saintly patience (as projected by Truffaut), even as she can’t live with him anymore.  Five years after their marriage, now in his thirties, they are finally getting a divorce, where sitting outside the judge’s chambers both of them flash back to earlier moments in their relationship, where often one can’t tell what the other is thinking, but the audience is fully aware.  In this way, it allows us to see not only Antoine’s reflections, but also those of his young loves as they work their way through adolescence.  Antoine also has a new love, Sabine (Dorothee, a French TV personality), who we see in the opening scene, a bright and optimistic spirit that works as a clerk in a record store, who doesn’t put up with Antoine’s dour and melancholy mood swings, as she has a constantly sunny disposition, effecting the outcome of the second book he’s writing:  “Because of you, I’ve changed my ending.  No suicide, the hero opts to live.”  She wants Antoine to move in with her, but he won’t even keep a razor at her place.  As a character (Pisier) later observes, “Same old Doinel.”  His situation is exacerbated by a chance meeting with Colette, where he immediately swoons at the opportunity to meet with her again, where she’s been reading his book, Les Salades de L'amour (Love and Other Problems), but once again, as before, she sets him straight, rejecting an impulsive kiss, reminding him that “It takes two to kiss!” and that he’s learned nothing, as relationships are more than “disappointments, arguments, and break ups,” telling him “You have a strange concept of relationships, all you care about is boy meets girl.  Once they’re a couple, for you it’s all downhill.”  In this final film, Antoine has never been more impatient and ill-tempered, always in a foul mood, spending his time whining and complaining about what a hurry he’s in and has no patience for anyone else, where all he really thinks about is himself.

Doinel is always on the run, always late, always a man in a hurry; the notion of flight is to be understood in every possible sense: time flying, always being projected into the future, always anxious (never content!), never calm, and also love flying out the window. . . also flight in movement; however much you try to flee from your problems they're always right behind you, pursuing you, etc.

—François Truffaut, in a letter to popular singer Alain Souchon, who sings the film's title song 

But we learn the backdrop of how he met Sabine, finding a ripped up photograph of her left behind in a telephone booth, vowing to find her and love her forever, like a hunt for a treasure chest, or the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.  Besides the interesting side story of meeting Colette, where even 17-years later, Marie-France Pisier continues to dance circles around a continually befuddled Jean-Pierre Léaud, Antoine incredibly experiences a visit from Monsieur Lucien (Julien Bertheau), like an apparition from the past, last seen kissing his mother on the street (by a different actor, Jean Douchet) when he was only 14, becoming perhaps the only character other than Antoine to appear in both the first and last episodes outside of flashback sequences.  As her most devout lover, Lucien adds fertile territory, including pertinent background perspective about his mother, where perhaps the most shocking detail in the entire 5-film series is claiming “She had a strange way of showing it, but she loved you.”  This, of course, puts everything that came before in a different light, where Lucien gently reminds Antoine that though his parents were imperfect, “the faults were not entirely theirs,” suggesting many of his problems are his own.  Just after his mother’s death, Truffaut discovered numerous documents in her archives that displayed an unspoken affection for her son, where in his biography, he reproached himself later in life for his resentment toward his mother, where one of the transcendent moments of the film is Lucien taking Antoine to visit her grave at the Montmartre Cemetery, one of her favorite neighborhoods.  Like the reconstructed torn up photograph, the entire Doinel adventure is an elaborate memory puzzle that needs to be fit together, where Antoine’s journey is a quest to find the proper balance in his life or be destined to always fall over the edge.  We’re left with the idea that once he finally accepts his mother’s love, though she never really accepted him, Antoine can stop running.

Truffaut was 46 when he made this film, and died just six years later, a year after his youngest child was born, making only three more films, slowed down by health problems that resulted in a stroke, eventually diagnosed with a brain tumor, where he died in 1984 at the age of 52, five films short of his goal to make 30 films and then retire, (along with his other personal goal of watching 3 movies a day and reading two books a week), hoping to write books in his waning years.  He is buried at the Montmartre Cemetery, one of Antoine’s favorite neighborhoods.  

George Sadoul, noted French journalist and film critic, writing in 1959 on the revolutionary aspects of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), which may as well stand for the entire Antoine Doinel series:

There is neither a ‘happy ending’ nor an ‘unhappy ending.’ It’s an ‘open end’ with a question mark. It’s just fine that way…this story flows along like life.

Bed & Board (Domicile conjugal)

BED & BOARD (Domicile conjugal)       B-                                        

France  Italy  (100 mi)  1970  d:  François Truffaut

I don’t know what boredom is!  I’ve heard people talk about it, but I don’t know what it is. There's always something to do:  cut the pages of a book, do crossword puzzles, take notes. I wish there were 30 hours in a day, ‘cause I never get bored! I can’t wait to get old so I can get by on five hours’ sleep! Why am I even discussing this? I’m going to the bathroom.
—Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud)

If I commit suicide with someone, I’d like it to be you.         

—Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer)

When things started to go wrong, instead of fixing them, I got scared and made them worse.  —Christine (Claude Jade)

Continuing on the comical misadventures of Antoine Doinel, BED & BOARD is Truffaut’s picture of marital bliss, as Antoine and Christine (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade), the couple at the end of Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés) (1968), have already married and are happily living together in Paris.  Originally targeted as the end of the cycle, as marriage is the established and customary outlet for love, but Truffaut discovered he cheated in marriage as well, as he had affairs with almost all his leading ladies, so what appears on the surface as a sunny romantic comedy turns into a melancholic critique of the suffocating and stifling effects of marriage.  In his quest for the perfect woman, Truffaut discovered perfection doesn’t really exist except in dreams, where in his case the disappointments only lead to eternal loneliness, continually plagued by thoughts of being unloved.  Perhaps Truffaut was happiest when he worked, consumed by the latest project as he carried on an interchangeable romantic affair with the leading lady of the day, while also attempting to put back together the dysfunctional pieces of his own marriage.  Rather than delving into the dramatic complexities of marriage, like Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973), Truffaut chooses instead to paint a superficial portrait that is both breezy and entertaining while also making a personal and somewhat confessional statement.  The opening feels like Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954), where the married couple leads a very public life in harmony with their neighbors, as characters spill out of doorways and windows, carrying on a collective conversation that seemingly never ends, all sharing the same communal phone on the ground floor café, as Antoine runs a sidewalk flower shop situated in the middle of a courtyard building.  He remains the center of attention, but rather than an examination of their lives, it’s more about comic timing, establishing a quick pace where characters feel rushed, as people are leading busy lives, where conversation is equally fast paced, veering towards screwball comedy, though, in truth, it’s not nearly as funny nor as complex as Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés), bogged down by the meaningless and listless lives of the bourgeoisie.   

 

Perhaps unintentionally, Truffaut comments upon the publicly displayed misogynist behavior of the French, where they are next door neighbors with an opera singer who is routinely seen pacing the hallway before storming ahead of his wife on the stairs, throwing her mink coat and purse down the stairs as an act of disgust as he continually leaves her behind, where she’s seen hurriedly catching up with him on the street, eventually strolling down the sidewalk arm in arm.  In another scene, an office manager openly fondles a secretary’s breasts in front of everyone, which is viewed as customary behavior, where French women are expected to fend off sexual advances from men, even in the workplace.  In contrast, the marital home is seen as a safer and more stable environment, as Christine plays violin and provides private lessons to children, where they are again welcomed with open arms at her parent’s home for dinner, where Antoine has basically married into the family he never had.  When they have their first child, they haggle over the child’s name, where Alphonse (a character Jean-Pierre Léaud later plays in Truffaut’s subsequent 1973 film DAY FOR NIGHT) becomes the consensus choice because he picked it, and anyone who has seen a Jean-Pierre Léaud performance knows that he’s a narcissistic, self-centered prima dona that always gets his way, and when he doesn’t, he carries on like it’s a devastating human catastrophe, where women eventually give in to his persistence simply to stop him from his adolescent fixation of continually hitting on women.  While the marriage seems on steady ground, there’s nothing really happening under the surface, where the marriage is more about what’s expected of them, as it hardly represents any kind of mutual collaboration, where Antoine is not one to make sacrifices.  When Christine pulls him into the wine cellar to recreate that kiss from Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés), it’s an ordinary moment quickly forgotten in Antoine’s eyes, as he has other things on his mind, where he’s writing a novel at night after Christine goes to bed called Love and Other Problems, an intensely personal and autobiographical means to get even with his parents, to which Christine comments, “writing a book to settle old scores isn’t art!”           

With a new baby, Antoine embarks on a new job, which he only gets due to a misunderstanding by the employer, a comical misdirection of sorts that lands him a job working for an American hydraulics company where he is given a seemingly arbitrary job, like something somebody would make up as opposed to a “real” job, yet much like his make believe detective in the previous episode, he is assigned the remote control to maneuver toy boats in a miniature scaled outdoor harbor designed by the American boss.  It’s little more than a fountain display on the outside lawn of the office building, or an outdoor pool with goldfish living in it, as it’s a business custom to find a pleasing and often playful décor as a contrast to the mundane and dreary world of business.  When Antoine mentions that he has to work late, it’s a jaw dropping confession that even a child could fathom, as what’s there to do at night with his remote when the customers are gone?  At any rate, this feels like it was an attempt at a whimsical style, as are a series of random appearances by bizarre characters, such as a Jacques Tati impersonator on a subway platform dressed as Monsieur Hulot, and as is Antoine’s sudden infatuation with a Japanese client, Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer), who is simply a different woman paying attention to him.  Their first night together is preceded by an interesting unsubtitled exchange between Kyoko and her Japanese roommate, where it appears the roommate is getting the boot for the night to make way for a planned and calculated evening of sexual intrigue.  When Christine discovers the affair, Antoine claims the exotic Kyoko is not “just another woman,” but “another world,” gaining little sympathy from Christine who is crushed by the lies and deception, eventually destroying their marriage.  Finding it pointless to stay when he’s not wanted, so he behaves like he always does when he senses trouble, he bolts.  What he discovers, of course, is that life with Kyoko is no great picnic, as it’s a relationship defined by a lack of communication, where the illusion is stronger than the reality, and he soon tires of her as well, brilliantly expressed by a scene where he’s forced to eat while sitting on the floor.  For a guy whose life is all about comfort, he couldn’t be more uncomfortable, seen grimacing and struggling, not knowing what to do with his feet.  Truffaut cleverly designs an absurdly comic marital reconciliation scene with Antoine and Kyoko at a restaurant, where Antoine continually excuses himself during dinner to call Christine from a pay phone on the premises, complaining about how miserable he feels without her, where once more the pattern is absence makes the heart grow fonder, as only when they’re apart are they passionately drawn to one another.  By the end they’re back together again, but when Antoine starts exhibiting the same impatient behavior as the neighbor, throwing Christine’s things down the stairs as Antoine storms down the stairs without her, one somehow gets the feeling he’s more trapped than ever. 

Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés)

STOLEN KISSES (Baisers volés)       B+                   

France  (90 mi)  1968  d:  François Truffaut

Tonight, the wind knocking at my door
speaks to me of past loves
before the dying fire
tonight, an autumn song
quavers through the house
and I think of those bygone days

refrain:
What remains of our loves?
What of those fine days of yore?
A photo, an old photo, of my youth.
What remains of the love letters
the months of April, the rendez-vous?
A memory that pursues me without fail
a shadow of happiness, windblown hair
stolen kisses, moving dreams
what remains of all these things
do tell me?
a little village, an old bell tower
fields and meadows, well tucked away
and in a cloud, the cherished face
of my past days.

The words, the tender words that are murmured
the caresses purest of the pure
the vows exchanged deep in the woods
the flowers one finds among the pages of a book
whose perfume quakes and stirs
have all blown away, oh why?

—Charles Trénet  “Que Reste-t-il De Nos Amours? (What Remains of Our Love?)”

Making love is a way of compensating for death. You need to prove you still exist.

—Julien (Paul Pavel)

In the third installment of The Adventures of Antoine Doinel where Truffaut continues to use actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as his fictional alter-ego, the director is in a more whimsical mood, creating a sweetly old-fashioned romantic comedy based upon a series of comic misadventures, where the lighthearted tone couldn’t be more completely out of touch with the revolutionary mood of revolt in the streets of Paris during the summer of ’68, though it lingers long in our heads afterwards, as if the images continue.  In the event we didn’t know, the director reminds us this is a memory play with a picturesque shot of the Eiffel Tower and a colorful pan of the rooftops of Paris set to the nostalgic-tinged opening song, Charles Trénet’s “Que Reste-t-il De Nos Amours? (What Remains of Our Love?)” Baisers Voles （Stolen Kisses) - Que Reste-t-il De Nos ... - YouTube (3:15), which becomes Antoine’s theme playing throughout the rest of the film in a lush, heavily-stringed orchestral version.  The opening credit sequence offers a dedication to Henri Langlois, one of the patron saints of cinema, including a shot of the closed Cinémathèque Française, where he worked tirelessly since the 30’s to collect and preserve films, even smuggling films out of Nazi-occupied Paris that would otherwise have been destroyed during the war. 

One of the unifying moments of the May 1968 uprisings in Paris was the firing of Langlois, where New Wave directors joined in the street demonstrations to protest, even halting the prestigious Cannes Film Festival that year, eventually reinstalling the iconic Langlois to his rightful position.  But this is a film that couldn’t be less radical or politically charged, as from the start it’s designed to be an audience pleaser.  By now, Antoine doesn't have any male friends at all, turning instead to surrogate father figures and male employers, but his laser beam focus is set entirely on women.  Antoine is still something of a dreamer who remains in a perpetual state of childhood, still not fitting in, seen with an everpresent book in his hand, where his Army dishonorable discharge interview for repeatedly going AWOL is chronicled in humiliating detail, finally setting him free to roam the streets of Paris, which is where he continually fled anyway to get away from the Army.  While tainted as “temperamentally unfit,” Antoine seems to relish the Army’s judgment, barely able to conceal his laughter, as once more he’s been cast out of yet another dysfunctional family.

Truffaut would have to admit that after the opening scene, this film is less autobiographical and was written specifically with the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud in mind, as he’s finally grown into his tall, lanky frame and become the recognizable poster child for the French New Wave.  Seen here, Doinel’s youthful flitting from one bizarre job to the next, and one obsessive love to the next, is more amusing than sad, as one excuses his behavior on the transgressions of youth.  Antoine has a new obsessive love, Christine Darbon (Claude Jade), who was of course having a real-life romantic affair with the director during the shoot, where they were briefly engaged, but we don’t see her initially as she’s out of town when Antoine comes to visit, but she has nice parents, who greet him warmly and treat him like one of the family, instantly hooking him up with a job as a hotel night clerk.  When they do meet, they’re not at all on the same wavelength, as Christine was deluged and overwhelmed by letters while he was away, receiving as many as 19 in one week, some of which weren’t very nice, suggesting they’d never have a future together.  He fumbles about his feelings in her presence, having another horribly awkward kiss in the wine cellar, becoming awkward and losing his temper before taking flight.  Yet when they’re apart, they are both irresistibly drawn to one another, where they’re better at expressing their feelings in writing than face to face when the words just come out wrong. 

Typically in Truffaut films, when one person is ready to make a commitment to love, the other usually isn’t.  Antoine fumbles through a charade of careers, where he loses the hotel clerk on the very first day on the job, allowing a private detective to talk his way into one of the rooms where an illicit affair is exposed, breaking into the uncontrolled anarchy of a Marx Brothers routine, with the husband attempting to strangle the man caught in bed with his wife, where in no time sheer lunacy breaks out, becoming one of the gestures to improvisation, as Léaud actually takes a tumble offscreen falling flat on his face, where the other characters try to repress their laughter, but it typifies the good-natured fun that this film has.  His next career choice is becoming a private detective, which apparently is all the rage, advertised on the back of the Parisian phone directory, where unhappy characters search for lost love.  Antoine, who couldn’t be more obviously inept when tailing someone, conspicuously hiding behind trees or lamp posts, like a silent film character, only drawing more attention to himself, (one woman quickly points him out to the police), nonetheless becomes consumed with dedicated seriousness towards his new profession, writing descriptive notes that elaborate on everything except the required information. 

When they send him undercover to work as a clerk in a shoe store, investigating why the employees all seem to hate their boss, George Tabard (Michael Lonsdale), it’s like a scene out of Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES (1936), where the qualifications for the job are hilariously determined by the applicant’s ability to gift wrap a shoebox, whereupon he’s immediately selected, though he is the least suitable candidate, as half the box remains unwrapped.  While he lacks any qualifications for the job and couldn’t be more irresponsible, he fits right in with the others who couldn’t care less about working there either.  While hiding to avoid work, he has a reverie moment when he hears a lone woman’s voice singing, as if calling for him in a dream, similar to the Antonioni dream sequence in RED DESERT (1964), and when he follows the voice, Mrs. Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig) appears like an apparition, a beautiful and sophisticated woman, where she suddenly becomes the woman of his dreams, like a character out of the Balzac book he’s reading where she epitomizes everything he’s learned to expect about rapturous love, remaining ever elusive, yet another woman to obsess over.  When he’s finally alone with her and embarrassingly blurts out the wrong words, he once again takes to flight, a clumsy response to what he sees as forbidden love, thinking she’s “above” the idea of adultery, where alone in his room in a crazed mirror sequence that borders on hysteria, Antoine rapidly repeats the names of Christine Darbon, Fabienne Tabard, and Antoine Doinel, confusing his own identity with the female objects he’s fixated on, seemingly seeking an impossible love. 

Choosing to write a letter to Fabienne to apologize for his behavior and express how he feels, Antoine is actually more comfortable pursuing her like a detective and reading about or writing to Fabienne than actually being with her.  Truffaut interestingly interjects stark realism into fantasy, resorting to a documentary style to show how the underground pneumatic postal system works in Paris, where a letter shoots through an elaborate system of connecting pipes and is delivered almost instantly, as is Fabienne’s bluntly sexual reply.  What follows is a continuation of idealized love, where we’re not sure Antoine ever really figures it out, but the use of the camera crawling up the stairs, step by step, clothes scattered along the way, wandering at first into the wrong room, turning around, and then finding the right room, adds an alluring air of mystery about what happens, where he even ruminates over the idea of responsibility, becoming a picture of domesticated bliss by morning.  In an ironic denouement, with Antoine and Christine sitting happily on a park bench, their backs to the camera, a crazed stalker comes out of the woodworks and offers a bizarre declaration of love to Christine, claiming “We shall never leave each other…not even for an hour,” something of a caricature of Antoine’s own mad obsessions, where we are left to ponder his own impulsive inclinations in this timeless ode to the passion and impetuosity of youth.