Love on the Run



This is the recapitulation, the prolongation and the ending of the Antoine Doinel cycle through the probable transition to adulthood. The transition from reality to the literary fiction, starting from the first game words "vais" and "vêts"; laying down the first important issue of "staying" and "leaving", it is a movie that has a double opening, the second time when Antoine open the curtains.
"A work of art can't be a settling of old scores; if it is, the it's not a work of art." The flashback from the precedent movie expresses Truffaut's sentiments and objectives of reconciliation. And through Lucien's "the faults were not entirely theirs" Antoine's incessant run and search of the motherly love can stop; he recognizes her love and the "strange way of showing it".
The "settling" is omnipresent, starting from the beginning with Doinel's Les Salades de l'Amour, interrupting once again the opening of the movie, summarizing the nineteen volumes, seems to underline the importance of this number, and auto-portraying himself in the same time: "Herein lies proof of the poor guy's trouble with women" and his mother's love. Criticizing himself in summarizing gradually with the flashbacks proving again that "the faults were not entirely theirs".
The theme of childhood and reconciliation is also shown through Colette and the Draguignan law-case where she has to defend a man that killed his son, and the fact that she chooses to defend him in spite of the death of her own child, an element that expresses the theme of forgiveness.
In the past Doinel is considered to be self-centered and "egoist", as Colette calls him and Christine before her. The past movies were all about him; here through Colette's narrative the spectator is driven away from Doinel to her own life; although one can recognize in the Draguignan law-case, the similarities between Charles and Antoine: in their marital life; between the murderer and Antoine: the killing of persons (the kid and the consideration of killing the protagonist). The similarities in the speech with Xavier especially when he declares: "I never sell books with the word "Love" in the title".
On must also not the importance of the theme of death, in Colette's law-case and her child as we have seen above. But also in the case of the kid in the train, that is saved at the last moment. And even with the murderer in the cinema, in the movie. One can draw two parallels with Doinel's protagonist, and Truffaut's Doinel; commonly, the three kids that had lack of attention of their parents.
Literature transforms his "true" experiences, like with Balzac in the 400 Blows, Antoine rewrites and reassembles, like in the torn pieces of the picture, his life in short stories in juxtaposed and unordered flashbacks until the last disturbance of the fast moving camera of the last scene, mixed with the 400 Blows. Insisting on the common ground like the handkerchief; or the fact that Sabine kisses him in the cinema while a boxing match is projected, in opposition to the other scene with Christine. Ruptures become reconciliation, like his mother's lover and him in front of her tomb in opposition to the first time Antoine has seen them together. This movie is summarizing, puzzling and suggests a positive "fuite" rather than a closed clear ending, because as they says it themselves in front of the mirror, "we can't be certain it will last".