The finest parts of "Love on the Run" are the inserted clips of the original Antoine Doinel film "Les Quatre Cent Coups", rather self-defeating in a way as they only serve to show up the shallowness of the film we are watching. Truffaut's decision to follow "Les Quatre Cent Coups" with a series of four sequels was one of the most misguided by a great director as they are undoubtedly his weakest works. They are supposedly semi-autobiographical with Antoine Doinel Truffaut's alter ego. He obviously had a great affection for the young Jean-Pierre Leaud's portrayal of the boy Antoine in what remains one of cinema's finest depictions of the precariousness of growing up, so one can understand Truffaut's reluctance to leave it at that. The unfortunate thing about the films that follow is that with each one the actor, through no fault of his own (simply the process of growing up into a not particularly attractive looking young adult) becomes increasingly more charmless. That he still had a little by the time he appeared in "Bed and Board", the fourth of the series, we are reminded of in a delightful clip of a scene where he plays a trick on his wife by reading a newspaper item where one word change alters the meaning from the respectable to the salacious. But unfortunately by the time we reach "Love on the Run" some eight years later Leaud had lost it. Nor is he aided by material that has become increasingly more trite. Bill Forsythe made exactly the same mistake with "Gregory's Second Girl", but sadder here to see a much greater director falling into the trap. At least we can be thankful that we have been spared sequels to "Bicycle Thieves", "The Fallen Idol" and "Fanny and Alexander" so that our memories of those wonderful studies of childhood can remain untarnished.
Review of Love on the Run
