Stolen Kisses

By Frank Rich

LOVE ON THE RUN Directed by Frangois Truffaut Screenplay by Frangois Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel and Suzanne Schiffman

The happy news about Love on the Run, Frangois Truffaut's fifth autobiographical Antoine Doinel movie, is that Antoine still refuses to grow up. Though the director's alter ego has come far since he first appeared 20 years ago in The 400 Blows, he remains a hopelessly restless, love-hungry kid. Antoine will badger, beg and lie to win a woman's affection, only to discover over and over that his hunger is not satiated by each new conquest. As a pal tells him this time, "All you care about is boy meets girl; from there, it's all downhill."

Antoine may be a child, but there is nothing childish about the films in which he appears. Through this character, Truffaut has found the perfect means for exploring some profound dilemmas of the heart. In Antoine's restlessness the director sees love's unpredictability, its evanescence, its incompatibility with the rude dailiness of life. Truffaut believes true romance can last only as long as a fleeting, stolen kiss, but, even so, he is not a weary pessimist. Each time Antoine (the ever boyish Jean-Pierre Leaud) picks himself up off the floor for another doomed fling, it is a victory of the spirit. The best Doinel movies, The 400 Blows and Stolen Kisses (1968), are among the most hilarious and disturbing film comedies ever to chart the vicissitudes of human passion.

Love on the Run is not among the best, but it has its moments. Truffaut picks up Antoine, now a novelist, on the eve of his divorce from Christine (Claude Jade), whom he courted in Stolen Kisses and married in Bed and Board (1970). Antoine is already in hot pursuit of new prey. As usual, nothing in the film turns out as first expected. By the t'me it is over, Truffaut has cagily shifted the audience's perspective on all his characters. A couple who appear to be lovers turn out to be siblings. Antoine's plot for a new novel turns out to be a major clue to his recent behavior. A nemesis from The 400 Blows turns up to help Antoine understand his bitter relationship with his now dead mother.

This is classic Truffaut technique, but despite uniformly vivid performances, the film never attains its promised emotional complexity. The major difficulty is the director's determination to turn Love on the Run into a retrospective of the entire Doinel cycle. Not only do old players reappear, including Marie-France Pisier of Love at 20 (1962), but so do clips from the other films. It may be a laudably ambi tious notion to refract the past through the present in such purely cinematic terms, but there is too much material to be digest ed in one movie. Too often Truffaut's flashbacks are hit-or-miss In jokes: while he shows us dozens of pieces, old and new, of the Antoine puzzle, he does not fit them together to form a fresh and exciting self-portrait. Some of the clips are brought into fascinating juxtaposition (or so Truffaut fans will find), but others are far less poi gnant in this film than they were in their original contexts. The result is unsatisfy ing and a bit dispiriting. Though Antoine Doinel maintains the headstrong velocity of youth, Francois Truffaut is beginning to show some signs of sedentary middle age.

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