Truffaut's 'Love on the Run': An 'Au Revoir' to Old Friends
eviewing "Love on the Run," Francois Truffaut's fifth and (he says) last film in the Antoine Doinel series, which began in 1959 with "The 400 Blows," is rather like reviewing a friend. It's as if one were to say,
"Well, I thought you were very funny this morning, very witty, and you were most appealing at lunch, but in the afternoon you sort of dragged, as if you'd run out of steam and, frankly,
I couldn't understand what you were about, that is, if you were about anything. At five, however, you picked up your pace when you make several brilliant phone calls, though you went on too long.
By supper, I didn't believe you for a minute. All in all, you were very uneven today, but the way you ate that hamburger -- comically yet vulnerably -- was worth the price of admission ..."
It is now as meaningless to review a single Antoine film as it would be to offer judgment about a single day in the life of someone we know extremely well.
No day can be isolated from all those that have gone before and those that will come after.
We've all grown up with Antoine Doinel and, through him, with Jean-Pierre Leaud, who was 14 when he made "The 400 Blows," and is now in his 30's in "Love on the Run."