When François Truffaut made his directorial debut with “The 400 Blows” in 1959, it quickly became an international sensation and the first hit of the French New Wave . Along with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” it established many of the conventions for which the French New Wave would become known: documentary-style location shooting, playful experimentation with editing and film form, and, most importantly, a direct connection between the filmmaker’s personality and the action on screen.
Many New Wave directors aspired to Alexandre Astruc’s theoretical dream of using the film camera as intimately and personally as a writer uses a pen (the “Caméra-Stylo,” as Astruc dubbed it), but few realized that dream and its possibilities as artistically successfully as Truffaut. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the director’s biography can see the direct connection between him and his hero, Antoine Doinel, a 14-year-old constantly at odds with a world of adults who don’t understand him and don’t care—just as Truffaut was drawn into the wing that Andre Bazin’s film critics introduced to Cinefil.
“The 400 Blows” is often given credit for kicking off the French New Wave — that glorious era that saw exciting work by Godard, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, and others exploding into theaters throughout the 1960s and beyond — but it kicked off something else too: a then unique experiment in world cinema in which Truffaut found an onscreen surrogate and tracked his journey from youth to adulthood over five years. films and 20 years.
This was not Truffaut’s original intention, and the fact that the Antoine Doinel cycle—which consists of “The 400 Blows,” “Antoine and Colette,” “Stolen Kisses,” “Bed and Board,” and “Love on the Run”—exists throughout is a testament to the Truffaut actor. “The 400 Blows” was designed as a standalone feature, and it remains the only one of the five films that truly stands on its own; its satisfactions require no knowledge that cannot be gleaned from within the film itself, while the sequences simply resonate fully in relation to one another.
What turned Antoine Doinel into a recurring character was an offer for Truffaut to contribute to an omnibus film called “Love at 20” in 1962. Motivated primarily by a desire to work with Léaud again, Truffaut took the opportunity to check in with Doinel a few years after “The 400 Blows” left the character frozen in time after his escape from a juvenile detention facility. “Antoine and Colette,” the short half-hour Truffaut contributed to “Love at 20,” features a 17-year-old Doinel as he develops his first intense crush on a girl he meets at a concert.
Embora existam substituições superficiais – o Doinel funciona para uma gravadora e a música ocupa o mesmo lugar em sua vida que o cinema ocupou para Truffaut – a trajetória básica de “Antoine e Doinel” segue a da vida real de Truffaut, quando, quando jovem, ele ficou observado com uma bela jovem e mudou -se para a vida da rua. No entanto, os filmes de Antoine Doinel já estão se afastando da autobiografia direta e para o que eles se tornariam: uma fusão das personalidades de Truffaut e Léaud, pois os filmes se tornam tanto sobre capturar o ator em momentos específicos no tempo quanto para recriar as experiências juvenis do cineasta.
Truffaut disse uma vez sobre Antoine Doinel que “algo sobre esse personagem se recusa a envelhecer” e aqui está o paradoxo fascinante no coração da série. Como a “infância” de Richard Linklater, os filmes de Antoine Doinel servem como uma espécie de meditação sobre o passar do tempo e o quão adequado o cinema é capturá -lo; Enquanto obviamente assistimos muitos, muitos atores crescem no filme, há algo em ver o ator retornar ao mesmo personagem por uma duração prolongada que chama a atenção mais focada para as delicadas nuances emocionais e físicas do envelhecimento.
O que torna a série Antoine Doinel interessante é que ele usa um protagonista tão estático para seu projeto de décadas de capturar o que Jimmy Stewart chamou de “peças de tempo”. Doinel begins the cycle as a teenager in 1959 and ends it as a divorced 34-year-old in 1979’s “Love on the Run,” but for most of his story’s unfolding he changes surprisingly little — the world around him and Truffaut’s filmmaking style evolve (the colorful but cramped 1.66:1 compositions of “Love on the Run” feel like the work of an entirely different director than the expansive widescreen vistas de “The 400 Blows”), mas Doinel não. Ele é tão inquieto e não reflexivo no final da saga (apesar de se tornar um romancista) como estava no começo.
É aqui que Doinel se afasta mais claramente de seu criador, um dos cineastas mais autoconscientes e auto-reflexivos de sua época; Onde a vida e o trabalho de Truffaut eram intensamente dedicados a contemplar suas próprias neuroses românticas e seu papel em perpetuá -las, Doinel nunca amadurece – apenas a perspectiva de seu diretor sobre ele. Starting with 1968’s “Stolen Kisses,” Truffaut becomes more detached from Doinel, his camera taking on an increasingly objective position and his perspective broadening beyond that of his solipsistic protagonist (an evolution that would reach its apex in “Love on the Run,” where for the first time Truffaut leaves Doinel behind entirely for an extended stretch of time to follow one of the women in his life independently of his observations).
Unlike Truffaut, Doinel does not seem particularly ambitious — in “Stolen Kisses,” he stumbles through a series of odd jobs (including, in a storyline that mixes whimsy and poignancy in a manner that Peter Bogdanovich might have had on his mind when he made “They All Laughed,” a stint as a private detective), and getting married in “Bed and Board” (1970) doesn’t make him any more committal about a profession. Não é até o final “amor em fuga” que ele faz bem em seu objetivo de se tornar um romancista, e é difícil ter uma noção de se ele é particularmente bom ou popular.
Truffaut, por outro lado, era um diretor de renome internacional, com oito festas, quando ele tinha a idade de Doinel em “Love on the Run”, de modo que o relacionamento individual entre autor e personagem que marcou “The 400 Blows” corroiu claramente com o tempo. O que não quer dizer que o impulso autobiográfico tenha desaparecido quando Truffaut decidiu terminar a série; De fato, o diretor traz sua experiência pessoal à narrativa de uma maneira que conecta lindamente o último filme ao primeiro e dá a Doinel um longo momento atrasado da epifania, embora sutil.
Enquanto “beijos roubados” descreve o relacionamento em desenvolvimento de Doinel com a mulher que ele acabará se casando, e “cama e tábua” descreve suas tentativas de escapar desse casamento – e tenta mais voltar a ele – “amor na corrida” força seu herói inquieto e o público o observando desacelerar e fazer um balanço. Está cheio de flashbacks para cenas dos outros filmes, e é neles que o poder sutil do experimento de Truffaut se torna mais evidente. Enquanto Doinel olha para trás em sua vida, sua incapacidade de apreciar o que ele se revela é o problema definidor de sua idade adulta – e uma fonte contínua de dor para as mulheres que ele professa amar.
O flashback principal do filme é motivado pelo retorno de um personagem periférico de “The 400 Blows”, o amante que um jovem Antoine testemunha que atravessava Paris com sua mãe quando ele está abandonando a escola com um amigo. Esse personagem amante, Lucien, está apenas na tela em “Blows” por alguns minutos, e há muito tempo o esquecemos quando chegamos à sua aparição em “Love on the Run”. No entanto, quando Lucien diz a Doinel que sua mãe realmente o amou, é o momento da série em que tudo se cristaliza-o efeito que essa revelação tem sobre Doinel, que finalmente, depois de cinco filmes, diminui a velocidade da auto-reflexão, deixa claro que tudo o que assistimos está conectado à busca do personagem pela mãe que ele nunca sentiu que estava lá.
The scene with the lover is clearly informed by Truffaut’s own discovery, after his mother’s death, of papers left behind that proved she was more attached to her son than he ever realized. In “Love on the Run,” it serves as the catalyst for Doinel’s belated awareness of his own limitations as an artist, husband, and lover. Though in keeping with the overall tone of the series, this awareness is only incremental. “I would be lying if I said Antoine Doinel achieved his transformation into an adult,” Truffaut said of the film, and the bittersweet aftertaste that lingers after the film’s conclusion comes from the open question of whether Doinel will truly change his behavior.
For Truffaut, the character became less and less a means of working out autobiographical impulses than an organic, self-contained creation that fused personal expression with a different set of desires: the desires of the Jean-Pierre Léaud fan to see Jean-Pierre Léud do certain things on camera that may or may not have been related to anything that had happened to him. The summative quality that defines “Love on the Run” makes it clear that Truffaut felt the series had run its course, though one wonders if Doinel might have returned had a brain tumor not claimed the director’s life in 1984.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel,” an indispensable new 4K UHD boxed set from Criterion, contextualizes all five films in Truffaut’s filmography and reveals some surprising facts about the director’s relationship to the series—archival interviews show, for example, that he doesn’t seem to have cared much for “Love on the Run,” which is shocking given the emotional impact the film has when watched as part of a marathon with the other films. If ever there were proof that directors are the least reliable commentators on their own films (an observation made somewhat ironic by Truffaut’s past as a critic), this is it.
There’s never been a better way to consume all five films together than the Criterion Collection, which enhances the label’s previous releases with new 4K restorations of the films from their original negatives. The transfers are exquisite, the hours of supplements pure gold for Truffaut fans. And the films themselves feel like time capsules that could not have existed in any other era, and like the timeless, enduring classics they are. Doinel can be an exasperating figure to identify with—even Truffaut himself doesn’t seem to have cared much for him as an adult—but as a vehicle for Truffaut’s reflections on love, art, freedom, confinement, work, and class, he’s consistently fascinating.
“The Adventures of Antoine Doinel” will be released in 4K UHD by Criterion on July 15.
