Love on the Run

LOVE ON THE RUN   ***1/2

François Truffaut

1979

IDEA:  While awaiting his divorce from Christine, Antoine Doinel has struck up a relationship with record shop employee Sabine. Escaping his troubles with both women, he runs into his former flame Colette at a railway station.

BLURB:  After all his aimless peregrinations and relationship woes, Antoine Doinel at last finds some measure of surcease in Love on the Run, the disarming final chapter of Truffaut’s 20-year saga about the imprudent, perpetually stifled young man. Per the title, however, he’s still chasing romantic satiety for most of the film. Proceeding from a hallucinatory opening sequence that blurs the distinction between passionate intimacy and hostility, Truffaut interweaves Doinel’s latest flight from responsibility with a spate of flashbacks to his tribulations from the preceding installments in the series. The uneasy sense that this is all a glorified, redundant clip show eventually recedes as the flashbacks accrue a psychic, spectral power, the traces of the past resurfacing for Doinel in what amounts to a delayed reckoning. Our protagonist isn’t the only one reflecting on the effects of his actions, as Love on the Run devotes just as much time to the subjectivities of the women who have crossed his desiring path. In the most surprising and welcome development of the whole Doinel series, it is Colette, heretofore the most narratively diminutive of Doinel’s love interests, who emerges as something of the film’s stealth hero. Often shot in adoring closeup, actress Marie-France Pisier imbues the character with equal parts moxie and melancholy, giving her a fully-fleshed life apart from the man to whom she is otherwise inextricably tied. Her happy ending is just as cathartic as Doinel’s, who, no longer on the run, is nevertheless gifted with Truffaut’s most ecstatically kinetic gesture, answering the concluding freeze frame of The 400 Blows with a radiantly romantic whip-panning sendoff.