Baisers volés (1968) - film review

After having being discharged from the army for lapses of discipline, a 20-year old Antoine Doinel seems ill-equipped to cope with civilian life.  He first gets a job as a night watchman in a hotel, but is soon given the sack.  He is then recruited as a private detective by an agency, his first assignment being to trail a magician with a secret love life.  Having bungled that case, Antoine is assigned to a shoe-shop at the request of its owner, Monsieur Tabard, who is paranoid that everyone hates him, including his wife.  So preoccupied is he with his job that Antoine has little time for his girlfriend, Christine.   Things come to a head when Antoine discovers he is also falling in love with Madame Tabard.  And who is the myserious stranger who is trailing Christine...?

Six years after Antoine Doinel appeared in the Antoine et Colette segment of the compendium film L’Amour à vingt ans, François Truffaut felt the time was right to resurrect his famous alter ego, who first saw the light of day in Les Quatre cents coups.

By this time, Jean-Pierre Léaud, the young actor who played Antoine in these two earlier films, had established himself as an actor in France, most notably for his appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s film La Chinoise.  By the time Baisers volés was made, Léaud had developed his own personality – a mixture of unpredictable rebel, loveable good-for-nothing and womanising scamp – which was perfectly in tune with Truffaut’s vision of the Doinel character.

In Baisers volés, Truffaut continues to use Doinel to relate incidents from his own life, most notably his terrible experiences in the army.  In 1951, after having absconded without leave, a 19 year old François  Truffaut was arrested for desertion.  He spent several gruelling months in a German prison before being offered a dishonourable discharge.

In stark contrast to the elegiac poignancy of Les Quatres cents coups and the emotional intensity of Jules et Jim, Baisers volés is a much lighter film, a sentimental romantic comedy about a young man finding his feet (and constantly tripping up) in an adult world.  The film’s title comes from a line in Charles Trenet’s song Que reste-il de nos amours? which is also used as the film’s signature tune.

This is a film which also manages to capture the mood of the time it was made.  The year 1968 has a special significance in the recent history of France.  The student demonstrations and general strikes that year shook the de Gaulle government to its foundations and resulted in a burgeoning youth culture.  Although Truffaut sympathised with these events, he never directly reflected them in his films, unlike his contemporaries.  Despite that, there is an air of quiet subversion which runs through Baisers volés (and indeed the subsequent two Doinel films).

One major political event which marked Truffaut at the time he was making this film was the decision by the French government to remove Henri Langlois from his post as director of the Cinémathèque Française.  Truffaut leant his support to the outcry from well-known actors and directors to have Langlois re-instated, and this meant he had less time than he planned to direct this film.  Truffaut dedicated Baisers volés to Langlois, and indeed the opening shot takes us right up to the doors of the Musée du cinéma in Paris, appropriately closed for business.

Truffaut believed that Baisers volés would fail at the box office because of the distraction caused by the Langlois affair.  He was wrong.  This proved to be his most successful film in France since Les Quatre cents coups, and it was a surprising success in the United States.

© James Travers 2001

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When it comes to farce, police films and bitter-sweet comedies, the French are best, and Truffaut is at his best in this delightful comedy of errors, or should I say in the ’Rites of passage’ of Antoine Doinel. Truffaut wanted to make realistic films on the growing pains of a Paris child, keeping the unpleasant realities of modern growing up and its consequences as a tale of ’two cultures’, the adults and the ’Ados’ (adolescents). This is a splendid film that does not age, ti matures.
Peter de Loriol (London, England)  

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