The Persistence of Memory

Each film by Franc,ois Truffaut is a paradigm of innocence. The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim were about the destruction of innocence. Shoot the Piano Player and The Soft Skin described its dangers, and Fahrenheit 451 was its vindication. Even last year's The Bride Wore Black (TIME, July 5), a hard-edged homage to Hitchcock, contained much of the director's characteristic compassion for its driven, doomed characters. Stolen Kisses is Truffaut's newest and gentlest film, a lovely memory of adolescence that begins with the delight of youth and ends with the promise of a melancholy maturity.

It is also a chapter in Truffaut's continuing cinematic autobiography. Antoine Doinel, once again played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, is Truffaut's self-styled persona, who got banished to reform school in The 400 Blows and was spurned by his girl friend in Love at Twenty. Now, in Kisses, he is seen leaving the army after struggling to get a psychological discharge. "You can always sell ties," shrugs his commanding officer, adding hopefully: "I hope we never meet again." His girl friend's father fixes him up with a cushy job as a hotel night clerk, but Antoine gets canned when a private detective (Harry Max) makes him the dupe in a divorce case. Joining the detective's agency, Antoine spends his days clumsily shadowing suspects and his nights wooing his girl Christine (Claude Jade).

The film's format is informal reminiscence. When Antoine takes an undercover job in a shoe store and becomes infatuated with the owner's wife (Delphine Seyrig), the sequence and rhythm of the scenes are anecdotal. After a brief assignation--which gets him fired from the detective agency--Antoine takes another job as a TV repairman. When her parents go on a holiday, Christine pulls a tube from the family TV and calls Antoine to fix it. They spend the night together and write love notes next morning at the breakfast table. Out for a morning walk, they meet a trench-coated stranger, a specter of the maturity that will eventually destroy their romance and their innocence. They barely treat it seriously.

No director working today takes such evident joy as Truffaut in the process of film making, and he makes the feeling infectious. Although he freezes the image in the middle of an action or plays with enlarging the size of the frame, Truffaut makes technique serve the story and never overwhelm it. He enjoys staging little jokes (the tea-drinking scene with the owner's wife is an unabashed tribute to Hitchcock), but they remain always in context. Many of the characters in Stolen Kisses and much of the action may be embellished, but it is all based and modeled on Truffaut's life. His is, therefore, personal cinema of the best kind, memory shaped by humor and artistry into warm and joyous experience.

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