When François Truffaut made his feature directorial debut with “The 400 Blows” in 1959, it quickly became an international sensation and the French New Wave’s first smash hit. Along with Jean-Luc Godard‘s “Breathless,” it established many of the conventions for which the French New Wave would become known: documentary-style location shooting, playful experimentation with editing and film form, and most importantly, a direct connection between the filmmaker’s personality and the action on screen.
Many of the New Wave directors aspired to theorist Alexandre Astruc’s dream of using the film camera as intimately and personally as a writer uses a pen (the “caméra-stylo,” as Astruc dubbed it), but few realized that dream and its possibilities with as much artistic success as Truffaut. Anyone with even a cursory awareness of the director’s biography can see the direct link between him and “The 400 Blows” hero Antoine Doinel, a 14-year old constantly at odds with a world of adults who don’t understand him and don’t care to — just as Truffaut was before he was taken under the wing of movie critic Andre Bazin and introduced to the cinephilia that would consume him until his premature death at the age of 52.
“The 400 Blows” is often given credit for kicking off the French New Wave — that glorious era that saw exciting work by Godard, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, and others exploding into theaters throughout the 1960s and beyond — but it kicked off something else too: a then unique experiment in world cinema in which Truffaut found an onscreen surrogate and tracked his journey from youth to adulthood over the course of five films and 20 years.
This wasn’t Truffaut’s original intention, and the fact that the Antoine Doinel cycle — which consists of “The 400 Blows,” “Antoine and Colette,” “Stolen Kisses,” “Bed and Board,” and “Love on the Run” — exists at all is largely a testament to the actor Truffaut cast as his alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. “The 400 Blows” was designed as a self-contained feature, and it remains the only one of the five movies that really stands on its own apart from the others; its satisfactions don’t require any knowledge that can’t be acquired from within the film itself, whereas the sequels only fully resonate in relation to each other.
What turned Antoine Doinel into a recurring character was an offer for Truffaut to contribute to an omnibus film called “Love at 20” in 1962. Motivated primarily by a desire to work with Léaud again, Truffaut took the opportunity to check in with Doinel a few years after “The 400 Blows” left the character frozen in time after his escape from a juvenile detention facility. “Antoine and Colette,” the half-hour short Truffaut contributed to “Love at 20,” presents a now-17-year-old Doinel as he develops his first intense crush on a girl he meets at a concert.
While there are superficial substitutions — Doinel works for a record label and music occupies the same place in his life that cinema occupied for Truffaut — the basic trajectory of “Antoine and Doinel” follows that of Truffaut’s real life, when as a young man he became obsessed with a beautiful young woman and moved into the building across the street from her family. Yet, already, the Antoine Doinel movies are moving away from straight autobiography and toward what they would ultimately become: a fusion of Truffaut and Léaud’s personalities, as the movies become as much about capturing the actor at specific moments in time as they are about recreating the filmmaker’s youthful experiences.
Truffaut once said of Antoine Doinel that “something about that character refuses to grow old,” and herein lies the fascinating paradox at the heart of the series. Like Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” the Antoine Doinel movies serve as a kind of meditation on the passage of time and how well suited the cinema is to capture it; while we obviously watch many, many actors grow up on film, there’s something about seeing the actor return to the same character over an extended duration that draws more focused attention to the delicate emotional and physical nuances of aging.
What makes the Antoine Doinel series interesting is that it uses such a static protagonist for its decades-long project of capturing what Jimmy Stewart called “pieces of time.” Doinel begins the cycle as a teenager in 1959 and ends it as a divorced 34-year-old in 1979’s “Love on the Run,” but for most of his story’s unfolding he changes surprisingly little — the world around him and Truffaut’s filmmaking style evolve (the colorful but cramped 1.66:1 compositions of “Love on the Run” feel like the work of an entirely different director than the expansive widescreen vistas of “The 400 Blows”), but Doinel doesn’t. He’s as restless and unreflective at the end of the saga (in spite of having become a novelist) as he was at the beginning.
This is where Doinel most clearly departs from his creator, one of the most self-conscious, self-reflective filmmakers of his era; where Truffaut’s life and work were intensely devoted to contemplating his own romantic neuroses and his role in perpetuating them, Doinel never matures — only his director’s perspective on him does. Starting with 1968’s “Stolen Kisses,” Truffaut becomes more detached from Doinel, his camera taking on an increasingly objective position and his perspective broadening beyond that of his solipsistic protagonist (an evolution that would reach its apex in “Love on the Run,” where for the first time Truffaut leaves Doinel behind entirely for an extended stretch of time to follow one of the women in his life independently of his observations).
Unlike Truffaut, Doinel does not seem particularly ambitious — in “Stolen Kisses,” he stumbles through a series of odd jobs (including, in a storyline that mixes whimsy and poignancy in a manner that Peter Bogdanovich might have had on his mind when he made “They All Laughed,” a stint as a private detective), and getting married in “Bed and Board” (1970) doesn’t make him any more committal about a profession. It’s not until the final “Love on the Run” that he makes good on his goal to become a novelist, and it’s hard to get a sense of whether or not he’s a particularly good or popular one.
Truffaut, on the other hand, was an internationally renowned director with eight features under his belt by the time he was Doinel’s age in “Love on the Run,” so the one-to-one relationship between author and character that marked “The 400 Blows” has clearly eroded over time. Which isn’t to say that the autobiographical impulse was entirely gone by the time Truffaut decided to end the series; in fact, the director brings his personal experience into the narrative in a way that beautifully connects the last film to the first and gives Doinel a long delayed moment of epiphany, albeit a subtle one.
While “Stolen Kisses” depicts Doinel’s developing relationship with the woman he will eventually marry, and “Bed and Board” depicts his attempts to escape from that marriage — and further attempts to return to it — “Love on the Run” forces its restless hero and the audience watching him to slow down and take stock. It’s filled with flashbacks to scenes from the other movies, and it’s in these that the subtle power of Truffaut’s experiment becomes most evident. As Doinel looks back on his life, his inability to appreciate what he has reveals itself to be the defining problem of his adulthood — and an ongoing source of pain for the women he professes to love.
The film’s key flashback is prompted by the return of a peripheral character from “The 400 Blows,” the lover a young Antoine witnesses cavorting around Paris with his mother when he’s ditching school with a friend. This lover character, Lucien, is only onscreen in “Blows” for a few minutes, and we’ve long forgotten about him by the time we get to his appearance in “Love on the Run.” Yet when Lucien tells Doinel that his mother truly loved him, it’s the moment in the series where everything crystallizes — the effect this revelation has on Doinel, who finally, after five films, slows down for self-reflection, makes it clear that everything we’ve been watching has been connected to the character’s search for the mother he never felt was there for him.
The scene with the lover is clearly informed by Truffaut’s own discovery, after his mother’s death, of papers left behind that proved she was more attached to her son than he ever perceived. In “Love on the Run,” it serves as the catalyst for Doinel’s belated awareness of his own limitations as an artist, a husband, and a lover. Though in keeping with the series’ overall tone, this awareness is only incremental. “I would be lying if I said Antoine Doinel succeeded in his transformation into an adult,” Truffaut said of the film, and the bittersweet aftertaste that lingers after the movie’s conclusion comes from the open question of whether or not Doinel will really change his behavior at all.
For Truffaut, the character steadily became less a way of working out autobiographical impulses than an independent, organic creation that fused personal expression with a different set of desires: the desires Truffaut the Jean-Pierre Léaud fan had to see Jean-Pierre Léaud do certain things on camera that might or might not have been related to anything that had happened to him or Truffaut. The quality of summation that defines “Love on the Run” makes it clear that Truffaut thought the series had run its course, although one wonders if Doinel might have returned had a brain tumor not claimed the director’s life in 1984.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel,” an indispensable new 4K UHD boxed set from Criterion, contextualizes all five films in Truffaut’s filmography and reveals some surprising facts about the director’s relationship to the series — archival interviews show, for example, that he doesn’t seem to have cared much for “Love on the Run,” which is shocking given the emotional impact the movie has when watched as part of a marathon with the other films. If ever there was proof that directors are the least reliable commentators on their own movies (an observation made slightly ironic by Truffaut’s own past as a critic), this is it.
There’s never been a better way to consume all five movies together than the Criterion collection, which improves upon the label’s earlier Doinel releases with new 4K restorations of the movies taken from their original negatives. The transfers are exquisite, the hours of supplements pure gold for Truffaut fans. And the movies themselves feel both like time capsules that couldn’t have existed in any other era and like the timeless, enduring classics that they are. Doinel can be an exasperating identification figure — even Truffaut himself doesn’t seem to have cared much for him once he became an adult — but as a vehicle for Truffaut’s musings on love, art, freedom, confinement, work, and class, he’s always riveting.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel” will be released on 4K UHD by Criterion on July 15.