Love on the Run [L’Amour en Fuite] ***½ (1979, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Marie-France Pisier, Dani, Dorothée) – Classic Movie Review 2590

Co-writer/director François Truffaut puts his alter ego film-self Antoine Doinel in the spotlight again in 1979 for the fifth and final time, as Jean-Pierre Léaud re-creates his most famous role in this amiable sequel movie.

It forms s fitting conclusion to Truffaut’s memorable semi-autobiographical saga, which began with Les Quatre Cents Coups [The 400 Blows] in 1959.

Léaud’s Antoine Doinel is now a proof-reader in his mid-thirties and gets divorced from his wife Christine (Claude Jade). Naturally, he soon finds himself back in love problems with record seller Sabine Barnerias (Dorothée) and with his teenager love Colette Tazzi (Marie-France Pisier), who is now a lawyer. Pisier returns from the 32-minute short film segment Antoine et Colette in Love at Twenty (1962).

Maybe the material seems slightly thinner and a tiny little bit less charming, revealing and exhilarating this time, so perhaps it was the right time to call it a day.

But it is still a lovingly crafted, delightfully performed and nicely written movie. Beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros and scored by Georges Delerue, it is a warm-hearted, pleasing nostalgic farewell to the Léaud/Doinel/Truffaut saga, and a French new wave farewell too. And of course it is a must-see for all of Truffaut’s many fans.

Conclusion it may be, yet you feel that Truffaut might well have returned to the series. But he died at only 52 on October 21 1984.

Also in the series: the segment Antoine et Colette in Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed & Board (1970).

Marie-France Pisier was spotted at 17 by a casting director, who had been tasked by Truffaut to discover a ‘fresh and cheerful’ new face for Antoine et Colette.  By the time, Truffaut cast her again as Colette, she was involved in writing the screenplay herself. She died in 2011 in a drowning accident at her villa at Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, near Toulon, aged 66.

Truffaut is the author of a book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, first published 1966.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2590

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