The fourth and penultimate chapter in François Truffaut's partly autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle is a domestic drama styled on the acclaimed comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven).

An exuberant opening finds Antoine (again played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, the gaunt face of the French New Wave) newly married to Christine (Claude Jade) and living in a smart apartment in a bustling Parisian neighbourhood. Truffaut's once wayward alter-ego - institutionalised in The 400 Blows, discharged from the army in Stolen Kisses - here dabbles with a career in floral artistry, starts work on his first novel and seems quite content with his burgeoning bourgeois lifestyle.

The arrival of the couple's first baby, Alphonse, should make his life complete. However, shortly after his wife gives birth, Antoine halfheartedly embarks on an affair with an intense Japanese admirer. ("If I commit suicide with someone," she confides to him on one of their first dates, "I'd like it to be you.") Out of depth and eventually thrown out of home, Antoine must choose between the two lovers in his life.

Bed and Board is, above all, a conversation piece. It's notable for some sparky interplay between Léaud and Jade, who share a pleasing chemistry throughout. The direction is often characteristically fanciful, with Truffaut slipping in several in-jokes and replaying both themes and scenes from Stolen Kisses.

At first breezy and tender, this leisurely picture slowly assumes a darker undercurrent, yet remains significantly less corrosive than Truffaut's other studies of illicit intimacies, Silken Skin and Jules et Jim. The film was born out of an unsettled period for its director, who would suffer a nervous breakdown shortly after the two-month shoot.

Chris Wiegand