François Truffaut | Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) / 1968, USA 1969

people are wonderful

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon (screenplay), François Truffaut (director) Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) / 1968, USA 1969

 

Truffaut’s third installation of his Antoine Doinel tales begins, once more, with his hero’s run-in with authorities. Arrested for going AWOL—for the third time—Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is finally drummed out, with a dishonorable discharge, of the military. And, true to form, he spends his first moments in his newfound freedom with a prostitute, after rejecting another for her list of things he is not allowed to do (such as touch her hair or fondle her naked breasts).

     His next step takes him to his friend Christine’s (Claude Jade) dinner table, sitting just as he had at the end of Antoine and Colette, enjoying the company of her beloved’s parents while his would-be lover is off with other friends. Although told that it will be nearly impossible for him, given his military record, to get a job, Antoine quickly procures a position as a night clerk at a small hotel through the help of Colette’s father.

      Once more, he works with the best of intentions, but utterly fails by allowing in two noisy intruders to a woman’s bedroom, the men being her husband and a private detective determined to arouse the attention of the police in order to establish her adultery. Antoine is immediately fired, but is just as quickly hired by the Blady Detective Agency.

      Here too he an utter failure, attempting to follow a person of interest by running from street sign to tree as if to make himself invisible—a bit like the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of the Blake Edwards series—but in the process only drawing attention to himself, and leading the woman he is pursing to report him to the police.

   Antonine's next assignment is to track down a homosexual's lover, who has left the client's house without even his clothes in the middle of their relationship. The lover is evidently a magician who does a nightclub act with chords in different colors. For Truffaut to suddenly introduce a gay element in his fully heterosexual Antoine Doinel series is most unusual; even I missed it as a young man seeing this film in the US theaters in 1969, his hidden sexuality revealed primarily through his narcissistic hand gestures, holding one on his hand naked with the other leather-gloved, presumably a clue that he is a man of dual personalities, a closeted gay man playing straight to the world at large.

    Reminded again that he does not represent the FBI or even a police officer, Antoine is put on the job. He spends the day going on the rounds without finding anything. And once again he attempts to visit Christine, who slips out the back door as her mother engagingly invites Antoine in for dinner.

    He dates a very tall woman, and tells a wonderful story about a nanny who takes her charges to through the park each day, dropping them off at a concierge of a cheap building before entering a striptease club and doing two back-to-back "naughty nanny" routines before returning to the children, tipping the concierge and walking them in their stroller back home. No wonder the mother has perceived that despite the daily outings the children seem still pale and sickly.

     Finally, he takes Christine out on a date to the magician's nightclub act, and follows the gay man's lover to a post office where he awaits his exit. But a call to Christine from a local phone booth, and the appearance of a truck that obscures his vision of the entry, and soon after the post office closes down, with him having observed the man's return to the street.

     Consequently, he is taken off the case.  

     Soon after, he is shuffled off to a job as a “periscope,” pretending to be a stock boy for a shoe shop owner trying to discover, hilariously, why no one seems to like him. If Antoine’s sex life, particularly when it comes to “kisses,” is still a stolen one, with quick grabs and sexual lunges, working “undercover,” so to speak, is the best metaphor Truffaut might have chosen, since its subject concerns, basically, tracking down others who live “life on the run,” or, at least, on the sneak. Antoine’s entire life has, so to speak, been undercover, a life without deep emotional commitment or spiritual fulfillment. And, accordingly, particularly when he falls in love with his client’ wife, Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig)—who after discovering his feelings, readily reciprocates—it hardly surprises us that he himself, once again, becomes the subject of the detective’s pursuit, leading, once more, to his dismissal. 

      Later the detective agency has tracked down the homosexual's lover only to reveal that he is married and his wife is pregnant. Unable to believe the truth, the man's former lover goes into a mad fit, attacking the head detective and destroying his paperwork. It is perhaps best that Antoine, an utter believer in romance, has been removed from having to encounter such a terrible revelation.

     Now working as a TV repairman, Antoine, we suspect, is no more suited to this job than he was to his others; but this time, he has finally won the love of Christine, in part because he has moved away for her and even admitted that he no longer “admires her.” With her parents away on a trip, Christine expertly removes an element of her TV set and calls the repair shop. When Antoine shows up for fix it, she finally lures him into her bed, and their relationship finally jells. She clearly has preferred all along to be the pursuer instead of the pursued

   Yet even now that things seem to be improving for the comic loser of Truffaut’s creation, the director hints of a future that may repeat the past. Throughout the film we have been shown that Christine herself is being trailed by a man who behaves just like the other detectives, and we wonder who might be following her and why. As the young couple sit upon a park bench, both finally slowing down to a moment of stasis, the strange man approaches her to declare his eternal love and begs her to marry him. Discomforted by the odd confession, Christine rises, suggesting that the man must be crazy, a statement with which Antoine, somewhat uncomfortably, agrees. He has, of course, been behaving very much like the love-starved man, finding his significance only in the lives of others. He too has been “crazy,” as loveable as he may be. Will Christine be able to endure his personal madness’s. The answer lies in the next of the Doinel movies, Bread and Board; but we already suspect that she is not as amazed at the “wonderfulness” of people, as a character’s mother, earlier in the film, has been reported to have declared on her death bed.

     To love Antoine, the audience certainly now recognizes, one must be able to laugh, a gesture we have seldom seen in the careful demurrals of Christine.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2015

Reprinted by World Cinema Review (June 2015).