This series surveys the career of a French New Wave icon, from his youthful roles as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel to his embodiment of a dying Louis XIV.
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BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
A fifteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud made his first appearance as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel in this quintessential coming-of-age film, a lyrical but unsentimental portrait of adolescence and of Paris.
Léaud stars as one of Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”—the young people of Paris in 1965, choosing between la tendresse and politics.
Léaud returns as Truffaut’s quintessential dreamer Antoine Doinel, flitting through 1968 Paris in search of love and livelihood. With short Antoine and Colette.
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BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
A fifteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud made his first appearance as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel in this quintessential coming-of-age film, a lyrical but unsentimental portrait of adolescence and of Paris.
In this bittersweet fourth installment in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga, Léaud’s character endures the travails of young married life.
In 1979, Truffaut and Léaud return for a final look at Antoine Doinel, now in his thirties, but perennially adolescent.
“Godard’s vision of bourgeois cataclysm. . . . A savage Swiftian satire, it traces a new Gulliver’s travels through the collapsing consumer society as a married couple set out for a weekend jaunt” (Time Out). Léaud has a revolutionary cameo.
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Léaud joins an ensemble cast for a behind-the-scenes romantic comedy in which the love interest is cinema itself. “Truffaut’s droll and generous celebration of filmmaking remains an enchanting experience” (New York Times).
Kaurismäki’s update of Henri Murger’s novel is “a fine, deceptively querulous comedy that mocks the conventions of art and romantic love while . . . exalting them as the only means of salvation” (New York Times). Léaud puts in a brief but pivotal appearance.
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Léaud gives perhaps his greatest performance as a castaway from the sixties and the sexual revolution, waffling between two women, in Jean Eustache’s chronicle of disenchantment in post-1968 Paris.
Olivier Assayas casts Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung as an actress suffering through ego battles and other disasters on a French indie film shoot, with a classically irascible Léaud as director.
Godard’s 1967 Pop-agitprop portrait of revolutionary youth, including an ardent Léaud. “Feels like a trial run for the May 1968 revolution. See it by any means necessary” (Time Out New York).
Serra’s masterful film brings us inside the bedchamber of the dying King Louis XIV, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in a performance the Los Angeles Times called “a magnificent stare into the abyss.”