Director

François Truffaut

France | 1968 | 90 min | French, English with subtitles in English

• Producer François Truffaut, Marcel Berbert
• Production Company Les Films du Carrosse, Les Productions Artistes Associés
• Screenplay François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Bernard Revon
• Cinematography Denys Clerval
• Editing Agnès Guillemot
• Sound René Levert
• Cast Jean-Pierre Léaud, Delphine Seyrig, Claude Jade
• Contacts

  MK2 Films
  

  gaetan.trigot@mk2.com

About the Film

students and workers, which nearly succeeded in toppling the government of President Charles de Gaulle. The film seemed so thoroughly out of step with the radicalized cultural scene into which it was released that its popularity surprised everyone.

Stolen Kisses is one of the five films in which actor Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Antoine Doinel, Truffaut’s alter ego that first appears as a 12-year-old juvenile delinquent in The 400 Blows.

After a brief update with the short film Antoine and Colette (30’, 1962), in which Antoine falls in love for the first time, we find him dishonourably discharged from military service and back in Paris in his little mansard in Montmartre. He dates Christine—the young woman he loves—moves from job to job (most memorably finding work as a hapless private detective) and from infatuation to infatuation, trying to reconcile the easy physical transaction of the prostitutes he visits with the impossible ideal of his employer's beautiful wife Fabienne (Delphine Seyrig).

Eventually, the success of this romantic comedy in the middle of May ‘68 is not really a surprise; Antoine is naturally against social conventions, and the scenario of Stolen Kisses (by Truffaut, Claude de Givray and Bernard Revon) is a perpetual juggling act through which harsh truths are disguised as light jokes. The sheer horror and inanity of competing in the open market for a routine job is hilariously summed up in a straightfaced shoe-wrapping contest, the outcome of which has been fixed in advance, to add to life’s injustices. Antoine’s other jobs (hotel night clerk, private detective, TV repairman) mark him as a disreputable drifter who is capable—like Truffaut and his breed of breakout artists—of sinking all the way to the bottom in order to rise to the top.

Teresa Cavina