Love on the Run

A decade after Bed and Board, Truffaut and Léaud returned for this final look at Antoine Doinel, now thirty-something and a published author, but still unsettled and on the run. About to be divorced, Doinel encounters a number of loves both new (a record store shopgirl) and old (the still beautiful, still feisty Colette, from Antoine and Colette), but all pale against his greatest loves: himself, of course, but also his mother, recalled during a meeting with her ex-lover. Flashing back to scenes from the previous films, the bittersweet Love on the Run moves from Doinel’s adolescence of The 400 Blows to his current state, a kind of arrested adolescence, where the desire to be loved still marks every movement. “There is a lot of childhood left in all men,” Truffaut wrote, “but in him, it’s even more so.” Léaud invests his typically frantic actions with a certain anguish, as if “thirty-something” were slowly being written upon his face.