Twenty years separate The 400 Blows and Love on the Run, the first and final episodes of François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series. The intervening period saw the director grow from a promising young Turk known for his abrasive film criticism to a venerable luminary of French cinema.
Arriving nine years after the penultimate instalment (Bed and Board), Antoine's swansong followed a string of astonishingly accomplished pictures including Day for Night, Truffaut's autobiographical celebration of filmmaking, and Small Change, his sentimental study of childhood.
The film opens on the day of Antoine's divorce from Christine, the music teacher he married somewhere between Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board. Unsurprisingly, Antoine already has a new girlfriend, Sabine, although she is fast losing patience with his lack of commitment. Endeavouring to stay faithful, the part-time novelist faces temptation when he runs into an old flame, Colette (co-writer Marie-France Pisier).
Despite our troubled hero's subsequent relationship-juggling, this is a quiet, melancholic picture, bookended - like Stolen Kisses - by a melodious theme song. The work of a true cinéphile, it's littered with filmic references. Witness Liliane's colourful illustrations, supposedly commissioned for Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois, released one year earlier.
Truffaut's film reflects on various forms of storytelling, examining the grey area between autobiography and fiction. (Tellingly, Antoine's debut novel is a thinly veiled account of his own life.) Love on the Run revolves around a series of meetings in which Antoine and the other characters revisit past affairs. Accordingly, Truffaut incorporates a series of extracts from his earlier films. The result is a kind of collage which functions as a retrospective testament to both his growth as a filmmaker and Antoine's initiation to adulthood.
Sadly, it was one of the last stories Truffaut would tell. He died of a brain tumor in 1984, after completing three more films.
