There are characters that have lived forever in pictures. James Bond has had 24 pictures, Rocky 6, Indiana Jones 4, etc, etc. But all these characters do not, as you might say, evolve, they are continually recycled into new adventures, and they could go on forever, as long there is a little imagination and box-office appeal. Very rarely has a life, a real life, been depicted in a series of films. Satyajit Ray’s magnificent and delicate “Apu” trilogy: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Apur Sansar (1959), have shown the life of Apu from childhood to middle age, but different actors have portrayed him. The Antoine Doinel quintology by François Truffaut is a very rare example in the history of cinema. 4 movies and a short film show the life of Doinel from his early teens to his early forties, always staring actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. And this life is tender, and poetic, and cinematically beautiful. Here, thus, is the life of Antoine Doinel, as I see it, immortal to us, the viewer, for eons to come, as long there still is a projector that can show Léaud/Doinel’s half smile through the celluloid, as long as there is someone, somewhere, out there watching one of these masterpieces.
Doinel was born, or made his first appearance, in “Les Quatre Cents Coups” (1959). There are just a handful of movies in history that are not only great movies, but, beyond that, are movies that have an extreme historical importance at the time and place they appeared, and, further still, are the epicenter of a wave that changes the face of cinema forever… or well, at least until the next big impact. “Les Quatre Cents Coups” is one of such films, the blow it inflicted on world cinema was so powerful that made it turn completely around at such a time and such a place where it needed to be turned. “Les Quatre Cents Coups” does not only mark Doinel’s first appearance, but it is also François Truffaut’s first movie, and, more important still, it is the very first movie of 60s French Nouvelle Vague, probably the last great cinema movement ever to exist.
An enormous casting process lead Truffaut to Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was just 15 at the time. Together, they are Antoine Doinel, but in this first movie, Doinel is much more Truffaut than Léaud. Léaud would eventually become Doinel almost entirely, but at a very young age and in his debut, and also because of a very personal semi-autobiographical script by Truffaut, the director is more important than the actor, who is just a vessel for Truffaut’s feelings and his need to express himself.
The movie opens in school, where it can quickly be seen that Doinel is not an apt student. He fails constantly, he skips classes with a friend, he wanders through Paris without a real purpose in life. At home the ambience is not the greatest either, his parents don’t know how to handle him, sometimes don’t care. The structure of society and the school system are also subtly criticized, but are not justifications for Doinel’s descent into the abyss. There is innocence in him still, which as the movie progresses is lost gradually in the raw of the Paris night, but he is no victim, and inside he always has rebellious instincts. Off course that in the few instances when he tries to make good, he is not acknowledged. For instance, he once applies himself very hard to wright a good essay on Balzac (his love of reading that is expanded in the next movies has a first glimpse here), but the Teacher thinks it so good that believes he has copied it, and so he is punished. All this eventually leads him to want to escape from home, hopeless in his fight to be understood by the teachers and the parents. He resorts to petty crimes, he is caught. He returns home, he escapes, he is put in a juvenile correction facility, he escapes again… to unknown future.
Truffaut presents this movie as a series of simple but effective sketches, of poor family life, of school, of the little adventures on the streets of Paris, and at the facility. Based on his own childhood memories, the moments depicted are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and they flow very well, gaining the public sympathy for Doinel, although we know him to be a liar and a thief. But this is by necessity, maybe by instinct (to survive) not by a truly bad nature. Doinel is a 15 year old boy trying to find his place. The poor family life and the strict 1950s system of French society and schooling are too much tight to hold free spirits, movie lovers and a rebellious youth.
In the last scene, as he escapes from the facility, in a brilliant piece of movie poetry, Doinel runs in a single tracking shot for 2 ou 3 minutes in the French countryside. He just runs and the camera follows him. His destiny is uncertain, but probably he doesn’t care. He is running, running away, and that is all that matters. The running. He reaches the sea, which he had never seen before, and still he runs, until his feet can touch it. He then turns and gazes directly at the camera. The image freezes and the movie ends. His indefinable look is caught. Is he lost? What does that look convey? Only each viewer can decide for himself. All life is in front of him. Can he live it, can he be free, has he grown up? Is the past behind him? I can’t think of another so perfect ending. The look, almost scared, as the doors of life open to him, in an abyss of uncertainty, despite the achieved freedom and the liberating power of the sea.
“Les Quatre Cents Coups” won, as it could not have failed to be, the Special Juri Prize at Cannes, and was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar, and is, of course, a very humane and lyric masterpiece, and a hymn to youth. A director was born. Truffaut, one of the most beloved of all time. A star was born. Jean-Pierre Léaud, one of the best of his generation, the timid yet powerful figure, that danced between Godard and Truffaut in the next 15 years, the symbol of 60s French youth. But, most of all, one of the most enduring film characters was born. Antoine Doinel. The also timid but rebellious youth, who loves books and music and cinema, and was always an emotionally unstable figure, as all human beings are. Doinel is probably the most human of all invented characters, because really he was not a character, but a reflection of a director, who was really a never-grown up child, and an amazing actor, who really was still just a child.
Three years later, 5 different directors made 5 different short films about love which were compiled into a movie called “L'amour à vingt ans” (1962). For Truffaut’s 30 minute contribution to this film he chose to continue Doinel’s saga, giving thus almost real life to this brilliant character.
“Antoine and Colette” is only 28 minutes long, but in it engulfs what every teenager has been through since the world began in terms of love. As a voice-off states at the beginning of the short-film, Antoine is now 17 years of age (the age of Jean-Pierre Léaud), lives in Paris on his own, loves music immensely and works in a record company. At night he usually hangs out with his friend René (from the adventures in “Les Quatre Cent Coups”) at music concerts. It is in one of those that he meets Colette, with whom he immediately becomes infatuated.
Doinel is no longer an innocent young man, but there is one subject in which he is still very green, and that is the subject of love. His assurance and strong spirit fail him as he tries to get the attention of Colette. He eventually does so and they become friends. They share a passion for music and hang out almost every day. He meets her parents, who like him a lot, and so he is a constant visitor of their home. Her parents see him as a convenient suitor for Colette, but she is never committed to him. She understands his advances, but without pushing him aside, she mostly ignores him in such, and remains friends with him normally.
She is Doinel’s first love, and as all first loves, Doinel grabs her every gesture and blows it out of proportion. He always wants to be with her, he obsesses about her so much that he moves to the opposite flat, to the delight of her parents, but not of her. One night, he tries to kiss her, and here yes, she repels him and he gets first furious, and then sulks. Which leads us to the last scene, first where she, as cool as ever, goes fetch him to have dinner at her house, dismissing his foolery about her, and then leaves him at her house with her parents as she goes out with another man.
At the end of “Antoine and Collete”, Doinel is left watching television with the parents of his first love, as she is with another man. His first heartbreak, his first glance of manhood and the labours of love.
Truffaut makes “Antoine and Colette” as a series of sketches of Doinel at his job, at night with Colette, talking to his friend René, and at her parent’s house. The ghost of the first film is present, directly with a flashback, and indirectly with a portrait Doinel has at his house. The movie is direct and down-to-earth, without climatic emotions. It is much more an introspective study of the first love, with the tenderness and passion associated with it, but almost restrained by the person Doinel is, and his inability to express emotions. The movie mimics in this regard Doinel’s personality. He has loved unrequitedly, and he resigns himself in the last scene. But he is living the life he wanted, has a job and is on his own. He was inexperienced, but now has known the pangs of love. He is ready for life. And life would soon come to him…
But that is love at the age of 20… something that really never was, except on imagination, a feeling concocted from nothing, a fling of the mind, a whim of emotion, a wisp of fantasy that cannot end but badly… but opens the doors to life.
Although the smallest segment, is for me the best, because in its structural simplicity lies perfection, the perfection of the first love flame, the perfection of unrequited love.
Six years later Truffaut was no longer a young filmmaker and Léaud was no longer just another actor. Truffaut had gained the status of master filmmaker in successes such as “Jules et Jim” (1962) and “La mariée était en noir” (1968), and Léaud had been a Godard regular.
In “Baisers voles”, or Stolen Kisses, of 1968, Truffaut presented the third installment of Doinel’s life, and the first one in colour. The uprising of the political instability and the youth movement dominated in France, but despite Doinel’s (and Léaud’s) mid-twenties age, Truffaut carefully detached himself (and Doinel) from that (unlike Leaud’s characters for Godard). Therefore “Baisers voles” is as detached, vague and light as is the life of someone in his mid-twenties. I am that age myself, and quickly related to the indecisions Doinel has about life, love and the future, indecisions that the movie also has.
Therefore, there is not really a story here, but a series of adventures as Doinel’s just takes life as it is presented, without ever questioning why, but moving along nonetheless. His innocence in life and love is almost totally gone, but his mysterious personality remains. A man of few words, it is sometimes hard to discern what he is thinking, but his feelings are often perceptible at the surface of his skin, although he never expels them to the outside.
The movie starts at a military prison, where Doinel is officially discharged from the army because he does not fit and failed several times to report. This is something that really happened to Truffaut in his young age, a period where he also tried to commit suicide. This impetuousness to join the army without a reason, to be declared unfit some time latter is a clear piece of Truffaut that he gives to Doinel, proving that the three (Doinel, Truffaut and Léaud) are actually one, in an almost surreal study of filmmaking, seldom done.
As soon as he is discharged he goes running to a hooker. Later he goes to the house of former girlfriend Christine (played by the exquisite Claude Jade), where, as had happened with Collete (who actually makes a cameo appearance, meeting Doinel on the street with a husband and a baby in arms), her parents are his friends but she is rather cold to his advances. Except that in this case, her coldness gradually melts, and even as she refuses she gives an inkling of true affection.
Doinel then tries to do what every young man at his age needs to do: have a job. So the movie is a succession of sketches of Doinel trying three different jobs: a night concierge at an hotel, a detective (which takes up most of screen time) and at last, when the detective bit goes south, a TV repairman. “Baisers voles” is filled with funny moments and light touches, as very interesting and curious little things happen in these jobs, but without a gripping storyline that one can follow like a normal movie. Doinel’s life is the gripping story here, and life is filled with these interesting moments, so the movie has a magic (albeit simple) of its own. And there is nothing wrong with that.
The detective part is the one which produces more mystery, but even so it is handled as almost matter of fact, and Doinel just goes along with it where he is taken, a character to which things happen, but who is not an active part in making them happen. Meanwhile he goes out on dates, with Christine and others, and, while undercover in a shoe store due to his detecting, he has a fling with the boss’s wife. But in the end, he and Christine exchange unspoken-teenage-like-love-vows in an incredibly beautiful scene, and end the movie together.
Doinel is a youth uncertain of his future. He can change jobs at a moment’s notice. Tomorrow he can do another one with just the same emotion. He skips from one girl to another, he goes to prostitutes and has a one night stand. But that isn’t real love for him. That is a necessity of the body (the way he runs right from the jail!). Just as he thought he loved Colette and is completely impassive in seeing her on the street, he now loves Christine with just as much intensity, and is very upset when she doesn’t respond. Yet, there is in him a necessity to be loved, and a hidden fear of being alone, and being about to commit the same mistake as with Colette. Just as Colette and her husband turn their back, he quickly runs to a telephone to call Christine. And there may lie a clue to Doinel’s hidden feelings, of which he never explains an inch to anyone, at least not out loud.
Life? He doesn’t care, he is still too young, and is free to do what he pleases. But love… love is a quest, and he needs to find it and hold on to it. And that is different from sex, the sex he has with the prostitutes and the boss’s wife. Without Christine he cannot be fulfilled, although, like with Colette, to like a woman and love a woman is to be physically entwined. He always needs a hug, and to caress the arm, and hold hands, and to steal a kiss. He needs the physical presence of love, the constant confirmation of it in the warmth of human touch.
Dedicated to Henri Langlois, the director of the French Cinematheque and mentor to Truffaut and many others, “Baisers voles” as a movie is very simple, light, and often humorous, doesn’t have a very strong storyline and in itself may not hold on his own with that much strength. But if we think it as a part of Doinel’s saga then… oh yes, then it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a masterpiece, and a hymn to youth. The liberty in life, the randomness of the future, the absence of seriousness in gaining a living and everything else, and the force of what it all comes down to, and is the very centre of being to every twenty something person out there: the force of love, of needing it, wanting it, and finding it. “Baisers voles” gives that. There is a beautiful scene where for 2 or 3 minutes he keeps repeating his name and of his lovers in front of the mirror, over and over again. Uncertainty, love and youth. That is what this movie is all about.
It can be considered the ultimate romantic comedy, but beware, “romantic comedy” nowadays means something else. But it has that charisma, and that light touch about it. Doinel ends “Baisers volés” with Christine, walking away in a park. For a life together? Maybe…
The late 60s, early 70s, was Truffaut’s most prolific time. Just two years after “Baisers volés” and with two movies in between, Truffaut felt the need to return to Doinel again, a suggestion also made by Langlois. “Domicile conjugal” (1970), in English “Bed & Board”, was the title, and not only Léaud was back (off course), for his fourth movie as Antoine Doinel, but also Claude Jade, who now was Mrs. Antoine Doinel, came to stay.
The same light tone present in “Baisers volés” was maintained, but the almost surreal like situations took over completely over the seriousness and the social attack that was so present in “Les 400 Coups” and over the nostalgic reminiscences of Truffaut in the second and third installments. Antoine Doinel becomes here almost his own man, as Léaud completely absorbs the character. The comic situations are constantly present, the peculiar characters, the many side glances over small details and bourgeois life and gossip. But, even though the first part of the movie still maintains the inconsistency of “Baisers voilés”, or, one might say, the irreverence of youth, this thirtyish Doinel achieves a more coherent flow, especially after his son is born and he starts having an affair.
Doinel is now married to Christine, and she is happy about it, as the first scene clearly shows. Doinel is still uncertain about his call. He starts the movie as a florist and when he is fired over a funny situation he gets a job at an American company. He and Christine live at a flat with very peculiar neighbors and the movie flows happily between scenes of a marriage, the neighbors, and Doinel’s job adventures, showing Truffaut’s incredible timing for comedy, his little obsessions (as legs) and Doinel’s (or Leaud’s) irreverent personality. Doinel is more open now as a person, more sociable, but he remains a person in constant need of physical touches and affection (on Christine’s side), and very passive, almost insensitive, to the path destiny gives him to follow. The way he gets his new job is very comical indeed, but Doinel just takes it with a straight face, as a given fact of life.
But these light touches and absence of clear storyline change when first Christine has a child and little after Doinel meets a Japanese woman and starts an affair. Again he is little active, the Japanese woman does all the work almost, he just receives her affections without questioning, just receives this new twist of fate without ever showing lust or love or wickedness. He clearly loves Christine and the new child, but this thing happened to him and he just goes with it. This goes on for a while and then Christine finds out. And then the movie hits its true meaning, its true nature. And Doinel, like the movie, hits it also.
Christine finds out and he is expelled from home. He refugees himself at the Japanese woman’s house while he attempts to gain Christine back. Sure enough, he gets bored of the Japanese woman, he misses the security and love that Christine gave him, and he misses the family life. For the first time in four movies, Doinel shows real emotion, loses his temper, doesn’t take what life gives him without a fight. He fights for Christina, but he cannot leave the Japanese woman for fear of being alone. The last scenes of “Domicile Conjugal” show a boy turned man, a man on his thirties who for the first time is not carefree nor in control of his life. Doinel has become a man, and it took a long blow to make that change.
The last but one scene reveals almost the pathetic side of this character, of this man. As he is on a date with the Japanese woman he keeps excusing himself to call Christine, one time, two times, three times, etc. And each time we see his despair. And each time we see Christine melting to him. And we know that they will be together once again (as the last scene shows).
Truffaut gives a movie with even greater lighter tones than before, that make the last segment with the lovers apart even more powerful due to the pathetic and absurd side of the situations presented, but that are nonetheless real, enthralling and heart-felt. Again the previous movies are mentioned, memories of scenes and characters. Doinel reminisces in bed with Christine about Colette. There are other little homages, as for example Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, who appears in one scene.
But if Doinel came of age very early in his life in “Les Quatre Cent Coups” only know has he gained the true essence of being a man. He has a son, a wife, he cannot be the one he was before. He has taken an interest in writing and his writing a book based on himself. In despair, he has an aaffair and goes to a hooker, but inside he knows now that he is grounded, that he belongs to a family. And that is the first consistent feeling in his life. The first thing that is not ephemeral. And despite having difficulty in understanding it, he finally does so in his own way. Christine recognizes his faults but misses his little particularities and ends up forgiving him. They need each other, but Doinel is much more dependant. When they part the first time he says she was her sister, her mother, her friend… and she replies that she also wanted to be his wife. Like Truffaut and his need to be loved by women, Doinel takes his time in comprehending the difference and distinguishing the fine line. But he finally does. He does not need just a woman around, that is proved because the Japanese woman, despite being present, does not fulfill him. He now knows he needs a special kind of woman and a special kind of love.
And at least at the end of “Domicile Conjugal”, he has it.
Nine years later, in 1979, Truffaut’s acknowledgment still continued to rise. 20 years precisely after “Les Quatre Cents Coups”, despite some commercial failures, the 70s had given Truffaut his Oscar, for “La niut americaine” (1973), his biggest success in America, and also worldwide exposition due to his role on Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977).
The reasons why Truffaut decided to go back to Doinel after almost a decade could be simple to ascertain if this movie maintained the tone of the previous ones. But upon seeing it, his reasons become a little more obscure. “L'amour en fuite” (1979), or “Love on the Run”, the 5th and last movie of the Doinel cycle, is more like an homage movie, a self-made homage, an homage to the life of Doinel, an homage to the four previous movies, which is clearly visible because half of its 90 minutes of running time is occupied by footage (in the form of flashbacks) from these movies (and also some from “La nuit americaine”, in which Léaud also stars). “Antoine and Colette” is so short (28 min) that almost a touch of every scene is given here.
Maybe that is the reason why many find this movie superfluous, a disappointment, just a reason for making money out of Doinel’s name, but I really don’t see it that way. Truffaut had also been very sick in the 70s, an early clue to his untimely death at the age of 52 in 1984. Maybe he wanted to close Doinel’s cycle, maybe he wanted to pay one last tribute, who knows? The character had grown in itself, and could continue to grow indefinitely to old age, but would Truffaut want to see an old aged Doinel? At that point in time, Doinel and Truffaut were both in about their forties, one entering and the other leaving (and Doinel dresses himself in the classic blue shirt of Truffaut), so Doinel could never surpass Truffaut. Maybe Truffaut felt that there was the place to keep Doinel. And history made it so, so there he remains, at that moment in time, forever, lingering in our imaginations, and immortal knight of life.
Nostalgic is the word in this movie. Nostalgic with a hint of hope at the end. Here Doinel is Léud’s entirely. Only the character remains here, the memory of it, where it came and what it become. The director shows the character he has made, shows twenty years and five films of it, a character that is no longer him or his, a character that belongs to the cinema. A documentary about the first four films of Doinel couldn’t have made it better, and this one gives a little extra more, a small adventure to justify all the flashbacks, a middle aged man in a sort of middle life crises (Doinel-style!).
The movie opens with Doinel getting out of bed. But it is not Christine who shares it with him. It is Sabine, his new lover. They are both in love and share many little things in common, as the movie shows. Sabine even repeats some of Doinel’s lines of previous movies, maybe a hint that they think alike and that they are meant to be. But the beginning doesn’t show that, shows the same instable Doinel unable to commit, yet more aware of his years and of his past mistakes.
That very same day is precisely the one he has to appear in court to finalize his friendly divorce with Christine. Is at the court that he meets Colette, who is now a lawyer, and who is desperately in love with Sabine’s brother, making a circle out of the universe of these characters.
All this process of the divorce makes both Doinel and Christine have flashbacks of their life together, and when Colette enters the picture, “Antoine and Colette” is given much screen time. Colette is not such a free spirit as before, there is some tragedy in her past, but re-meeting Doinel makes her rebellious charm transpire once again. Doinel, off course, is yet again affected by her.
They meet again on a train, not by accident. Just before, she had been reading his autobiographical romance which he had started writing at the time of “Domicile Conjugal” and finished two years before. This is an excuse to more flashbacks, and slowly, Truffaut pastes out of these memories the full portrait of Doinel, what he really his, what is his true nature, how he evolved and what he has become. This may be cheaply done, but is also cleverly done, because it builds up to the original and fundamental moment of “L’amour en fuit”, and for me the reason why this film had to be made, and why it has a sense of its own in the Doinel universe. I am talking of the conversation he and Colette have on the train, where she confesses that she was in love with him at the time of “Antoine and Colette”, but he was always so possessive, and obsessive, always around, that she had enough.
At this point Doinel finally begins to understand himself, and reveals another point of the story, which is how he met Sabine and what made him fall in love with her. This is important because it gives a sense to that love on the run (immediately materialized because he pulls the emergency break and jumps off the train). Sabine wants nothing with him anymore, but this new understanding of himself which slowly unravels as other things happen will lead to the ultimate end of the saga, where he can finally find love and peace.
These other things include a meeting of Christina and Colette discussing Doinel (the club of the exs of Doinel, Colette calls them), more flashbacks, real and “faked” (that is, not taken from other movies, like Doinel having an affair with a friend of Christina, and she breaking up with him using the same line as Christina, of that he needed a mother, a sister, a daughter and a wife all in one). But after the train scene, the power of the film is in the story behind the picture of Sabine Doinel has in his pocket and how it came to be there and how it symbolizes true love. Simple, yes. But heart endearing.
All in all “L’amour en fuit” is the moment of Doinel’s life where he comes to terms with his past. It comes over and over again during the picture, first to haunt him and progressively to teach him, until he can deal with it and finally discard it to move forward.
He is still hesitant, still uncertain. He is not always correct, he has affairs, he lies, he says things in his autobiography that we know to be untrue. But through all that time he has learned to love, and in Sabine, in a movie-like-romantic-way, he has found his love, and he runs first from it, and then he runs towards it to save it, and hold it. Will it last? Maybe if there was another movie no. But I think Truffaut new there would not be another movie, so the little hints he gives us, especially that same line she uses with her brother, that is exactly the same Doinel had used with Christine two movies before, is a sign, a sign they were meant to be. And Léaud knew this also to be his ultimate turn. Starting the movie the same Doinel as ever, he progressively embodies the understanding of the character. He has ran for love before, and he has found true love before. But he never showed as much determination before. He never fought for Colette. He begged like a lost children for Christine at the end of “Domicile Conjugal”. But here he runs and fights for Sabine, and in this may lie the difference.
But “L’amour en fuite” has also another strong character, Colette. Christine is always happy and with a smile, with her grown up son, and she does not appear to miss Doinel. It is never shown if she has a new lover or what she does with her life now. A flaw of the movie perhaps, but the focus has always been Doinel, so it’s a natural casualty. But Christine had 2 movies, and Colette only 20 min. And here Colette is given much more character depth, which is a pleasant surprise and an asset to the movie. Furthermore actress Marie-France Pisier is drop dead gorgeous here, much more than 20 years before as a teenager.
Doinel has reached middle age. Doinel has reached stability in life. He has learned to accept himself, but he has learned to give himself to others. He confesses that he was never much to explain his feelings. This is the first step. And the rest Truffaut leaves to the imagination of the viewers, and each can give him a future. Any future. But his past is beautifully portrayed in 5 pictures. One of them (the first) a masterpiece. One of them a moving story of first love. Two light comedies with exquisite details. And “L’amour en fuite”, which on its own simply doesn’t exist as a movie, but as a last installment of a saga gains respect, as an incredible self homage to a screen character, and a revelation of a man to himself, the acceptance of growing up, the acceptance of the past, and the discovery of everlasting true love.
Doinel is a romantic. Always has been, and always will be. He is the centre of his own story, the main character of his own book. He is still in need of attention, still in need of affection. But now he has unraveled the secrets of his past, has come to terms with it, has, almost for the first time, grown. And hidden in pieces of films of others since then, inspired by these, his life continues.
20 years have passed. 5 movies have been made and seen by millions. And 31 years have passed since the last one. Truffaut became Doinel who became Léaud who became Doinel who became immortal. And uniting time and space and characters and actors and writers and director one word: poetry. A poetry in pictures. A poetry of love. A poetry of life. A man immortal. A man in movies. Antoine Doinel, rebellious youth, instable young man, middle-life man dependent of love. Antoine Doinel. Immortal. Cinema legend. Cinema life. A life shinning through the celluloid. A life like no other. A poetic life. A poetic life in pictures.
