Baisers Volés



In the Stolen Kisses, Antoine Doinel has just left the army, dismissed for behavioral reasons, in love with Christine Darbon,he goes to visit after going the stop at the brothel. He makes various jobs: night-guard in a hotel, he is fired despite his having participated unwillingly in the discovery of adultery by a private detective. This last helps him get a job in the detective agency, the director of the agency entrusted him with a visit to the shoe store of Mr. Tabard, Antoine falls in love with Madame Tabard the femme exceptionnelle; one must note that she is always dressed in white or surrounded by it, and specially the “apparition” in the first time they meet and later, where she is standing by the window and the Eiffel Tour holding the disc. All the women have the common points to be pretty, each one exceptional in her way, symbolizes by their legs, hair and skin and often, like Antoine’s mother, looking in mirror.
Fired once again, Antoine is hired to repair televisions. Christine calls in a false pretext to repair a television she broke herself. One sees the scene where Antoine is fixing the device, to an empty scene, an empty apartment; The camera follows the scattered parts of the television on the ground replaced by Christine’s shoes, to lead us in the parents room where Antoine and Christine are sleeping together. The next morning, desire is replaced by a more socialized love. During breakfast, despite the proximity of the couple, writing, the way of Antoine expression, they exchange in small notes and we understand that Antoine asked her to marry him.
The instability and the provisional are the main themes of this movie where both love and death are present: “occasional love is a way to feel ourselves alive” shifting constantly form fiction to reality and vise-versa, as one can see in his language and the music. Along the movie different kinds of love scroll: the corporal love at the brothel; the social love with Christine; and the spiritual love with Madame Tabard; the rejected love of Mr. Tabard; and abandoned love of Mr. Albani. Every character is immersed in a love triangle. And it shows from the beginning, when Antoine is dismissed from the army until the end when the man who follows Christine, addresses her and calls essentially into question the happiness between her and Antoine.
Like in the previous movies of Antoine Doinel, music, literature, cinema, and specially writing have an important role of in the expression of the protagonist. The music in Stolen Kisses contributes in the definition of the character one can mention again the moment of “apparition” or the moment when the camera leeds us to Antoine and Christine in bed.
This movie is happier that the 400 blows and Antoine and Colette, the comic almost present everywhere even in the most serious dialogues in the investigators office, where the stories of life merge with those of the fantasy, like it is the case of the illusionist. The movie ends with an achievement of Antoine. Stolen Kisses describes a kinds of relationships of persons that are more mature and more complicated, dealing with philosophical questions about the circle of life for instance. Yet has much in common with the simplicity of Antoine and Colette, and keeps closely the importance of the family and adoption.