Antoine Grows Up

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.

The film concludes Truffaut's autobiographical quintet: The 400 Blows (1959), Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1972. Featuring Jean-Pierre Leaud, who has played Antoine Doinel in all five films, exquisitely depicts french life from the early sixties to the present day. Interweaving flashbacks from his pervious films. Truffaut presents the definitive and final portrait of Antoine in Love on the Run. Charming, irresponsible and utterly romantic, Doinel, the director's alter ego, makes love, writes, philosophizes, eats and drinks all with the same gallic enthusiasm. We know at the end that Antoine will remain forever the child who said "if I tell the truth they don't believe me."

The film explores the duality of Doinel's nature; on one hand, he defends his solitude with a stubborn, irrational fervor: no, he will not leave his shirts or razor at his girlfriend Sabine's flat, even though doing so would put an end to his continual lateness at work. Yet he tracks down, seduces, and falls in love with this same woman, all from finding a photograph of her, ripped up on the floor of a telephone booth. He forgets that he and his wife Christine (Claude Jade) are to be divorced that morning. Yet as he and his wife ride along in the taxi, Truffaut reveals through a series of flashbacks their courtship, love and marriage. The tenderness and love that still exists between them evokes a poignant sadness at their break-up. We saw them in Stolen Kisses drinking wine. We saw them married in Bed and Board. Now we see them about to be divorced. The movie constantly connects with the past, giving us a sense of history.

Written by Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel and Suzanne Schiffman, the screenplay presents not so much a plot as an intermingling of the past with the present. His torrid, impossible liason with the leonine Liliane (Dani) mirrors his student infatuation with Colette (Marie-France Pisier), the bouffant-haired, Capri-painted flirt he had met 20 years before at a Berlioz Youth concert. Antoine runs past her outside the courthouse where his divorce from Christine has just been made official, only to see her at the railroad station when, always the incurable romantic, he jumps aboard her train. First seen in The 400 Blows, his mother's lover comes back to show Antoine her grave in the Montmartre cemetary.

It was in 1959 that we saw the adolescent Antoine constructing a shoebox shrine to Balzac. Now in Love on the Run, we see Antoine working in a printing shop and writing books. Through his autobiographical persona. Truffaut speaks for all the children in the world who grew up living vicariously through fiction. Mixed-up, intellegent, creative. Antoine symbolizes the modern intellectual who spent his adolescence going to classical music concerts only to fall in love with the girl in the next aisle.

Once again, Jean-Pierre Leaud delivers a perfectly realized portrait of Antoine. Playing Truffaut's autobiographical self, Leaud has merged the three: Antoine, Truffaut and himself. The rest of the performances are equally superb. Claude Jade manages to endow the solemn Christine with a rare subtlety. Nicknamed Peggy Proper because of her almost British reserve, Jade allows this woman's wit and shy humor to shine out. Marie-France Pisier performs most of the heavy dramatics; she gives her Colette a certain desperation well-suited to a woman lawyer unable to get clients and reduced to turning tricks on the night train to Aix-En-Provence. Dorothee gives the vapid Sabine the right amount of charm and selfishness to attract an aging, self-styled masochist like Antoine.

All in all, Love on the Run is a brilliant, lyrical conclusion to Truffaut's quintet and reestablishes Truffaut's directional preeminence.