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Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After

Friday, January 25, 2008
7:00 p.m. Love on the Run
François Truffaut (France, 1979)

(L’amour en fuite). A decade after Bed and Board, Truffaut and Léaud returned for this final look at Antoine Doinel, now thirty-something and a published author, but still unsettled and on the run. About to be divorced, Doinel encounters a number of loves both new (a record store shop-girl) and old (the still beautiful, still feisty Colette, from Antoine and Colette), but all pale against his greatest loves: himself, of course, but also his mother, recalled during a meeting with her ex-lover. Flashing back to scenes from the previous films, the bittersweet Love on the Run moves from Doinel’s adolescence of The 400 Blows to his current state, a kind of arrested adolescence, where the desire to be loved still marks every movement. “There is a lot of childhood left in all men,” writes Truffaut, “but in him, it’s even more so.” Léaud invests his typically frantic actions with a certain anguish, as if “thirty-something” is slowly being written upon his face.

—Jason Sanders

• Written by Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel. Photographed by Nestor Almendros. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marie-France Pisier, Claude Jade, Dani. (95 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Janus/Criterion Collection)