Domicile Conjugal






The scenario depicts the difficulties of communal life of the young couple. The scenes of the daily life, in the apartment and the courtyard, are truculent and tender at once. Domicile Conjugal is full of emotion, simplicity and truth always present is Truffaut’s cinema.

The couple are now married Christine gives violin lessons, and Antoine has a unordinary job: he dyes and sells flowers. Doinel gets a new job where he maneuvers radio-controlled boats around a pond; imaginary jobs that seems to go out of the child in Doinel’s mind. They live in building full of interesting characters, such as the man who never leaves his room; the opera singer who fights with his italian wife, the surrealistic person with the guy that borrows money from him. With it comes the aspect of repetitions and habitude of the characters.
In bed Antoine and Christine are always reading there is no sexuality, they are a typical married couple even before Christine becomes pregnant, worst, after the birth Antoine becomes even more distant. He teases her about her breasts but in a very brotherly way. Sexuality is always seen outside the marriage life, for instance the Doinel contact with the prostitutes is very tender. His declaration in the street sums it: "You are my sister, my daughter, my mother." Christine replies simply, "I'd hoped to be your wife."
He is still restless (literally he cannot sit on the floor while having dinner with Madame Butterfly) even after having his own family he still feels spitefulness towards his mother: “Mother’s Day is an invention created by the Nazis,” he says and that “[he] [likes] parents that are not [his] own”. The Domicile Conjugal is a much safer place if one compares it the 400 Coups, most of the action takes place in the apartment, in the building, or the court inside the building.
The film comic and sad in the same time, Antoine has not fully changed and not achieved fully what he wants, like his quest of the absolute red and there is always one flower that refuses to change color. This aspect of humor and sadness of fully expressed when Christine makes herself look like Madame Butterfly, that is in the same time surprising, comic and dramatic. So as the casual appearance of the filming of the scenes that contributes to this last effect. In the same way the camera creates the effect of the tension, attractiveness, suspicion, or curiosity between the characters. Geography and devices mount the effects mentioned before, like the role of the television, dinner table, the phone cabinet, windows among others, as bonding or separating objects.

It seems that comfort and safety represented but the building and the home, is not a position where Antoine can stay, and as soon as he gets out of this location trouble finds him. And the brothel is the only place where he finds momentary refuge.