If New York City's Museum of Modern Art can do it, then so can I: reading recently that MOMA held a retrospective of Francois Truffaut's esteemed Antoine Doinel series, I resolved to do the same in my own home. The first four of the five films were, thankfully, sitting on the shelf at my local video store, while the fifth was soon en route via Chicago-based Facets' incomparable rental-by-mail service. Since when do big-city folk get to have all the fun?

For those unfamiliar with the name, Antoine Doinel is the fictional subject of Truffaut's first feature-length opus back in 1959, The 400 Blows, which was no less than a sensation upon its initial release. Among the front line of films of the French "New Wave" that emphasized the primacy of the director's self-expression over stylized corporate studio product, Blows introduced 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud to the world as Truffaut's pseudo-autobiographical surrogate, a vicarious partnership they would continue through four more films over twenty years. Collaborating with several directors for a collection of short films called Love At 20 in 1962, Truffaut would revisit his subject in late adolescence, and clearly the nostalgic impact was enough to encourage him to document Doinel's young adult life in Stolen Kisses in 1968, Bed and Board in 1970, and finally Love on the Run in 1978.

What proves surprising is not that Truffaut's famous series allows us to watch the same actor and his character grow up before our eyes, but that it's the only one of its kind to date. Surely the medium of motion pictures was ideally suited to such a project, for being both capable of narratives of a serialized nature and for being able to photographically record the physical features of its subjects throughout the passage of time. Of course Michael Apted's 7Up documentary series is doing the same thing, but with factual characters and at a certain distance, and fiction films often generate sequels, but with more plot- or revenue-driven agendas, rather than to simply see what their young protagonists will grow up to be. So what we have is a collective work of art, unique unto itself, possible only within its own medium, certainly enough to immortalize its creator (who unexpectedly died soon after the fifth installment), but surprisingly only a portion of his astonishing creative output.

Also striking is how the first entry in the series, Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), stands alone as a self-contained masterpiece. Winning the Best Director prize at the 1959 Cannes film festival as well as an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, Blows identifies Doinel's humble beginnings in a claustrophobic one-bedroom Paris apartment (he sleeps in the hallway) with two working parents, a jocose father and a noticeably testy but beautiful mother. While it's not exactly the easy life at home, school proves even less fun; his teacher is derisive at best, with little patience for his students' adolescent antics. In truth neither environment seems extraordinarily oppressive, but one day when Antoine plays hooky with a friend, he catches his mother kissing another man on a street corner (and she notices him), and we foresee the end of a child's innocence.

Not once are we led to believe Antoine isn't good-natured and simply playful, but we also realize the deck is stacked against him more than once. His behavior toes the line between prankish and risking serious consequences; though all of us often got away it in our childhood, Antoine never does. It is as though Paris as Antoine's playground is also subtly metaphorical - the course of a kid's life is at stake with every turn. But had any of his guardians tried an ounce of forgiveness, surely his fate would've been other than in a reform school.

Sublimating his anger toward his cheating mom, he explains his absence from school to his teacher the next day by declaring his mother has died; this finally brings out a sympathetic side in the instructor, but when his mom shows up at school later that day, Antoine realizes that was the last shred of kindness he can ever expect from him. (Somehow I got out of P.E. class in third grade by faking a note from my mother stating I had a broken arm, despite the absence of a cast or any discomfort, and everyone found it simply amusing.) Retreating into the world of literature, Antoine discovers the societal satires of Balzac, which you would think any parent would applaud, but this, too, brings disaster: he almost burns the apartment down with a candle in his Balzac shrine, and he's caught plagiarizing his literary idol for a paper in class. It's all done in innocent adoration, but both parents and teacher have zero patience anymore, and Antoine runs away from home.

Who among us hasn't run away from home as well? Surely this is regarded as simply another mode of acting out one's fears and frustrations, but Antoine truly resolves never to return home, and wanders the streets of Paris, sleeping in factories and stealing milk and fruit; he's even supported by a more affluent classmate for a time, but then Antoine tries to steal and pawn a typewriter from his dad's office - just his luck that, unable to sell the machine on the street, he's arrested upon trying to return the machine to its original resting place. As Antoine is locked into a holding cell that seems little better than his parents' apartment, and his parents finally deem him incorrigible, we realize that this is how, little by little, a kid falls by the wayside.

Despite unanimity among critics that this film constitutes Truffaut's spiritual autobiography of sorts, it's his detachment as a director that makes the film so affecting. Just as Antoine is never portrayed as inherently rotten (just occasionally irresponsible), his parents are equally human in their range of qualities, from fun-loving to petty. The narrative is also not without its moments of comic brilliance: Antoine pinned against the wall in a carnival centrifuge the day he skips school; his classmates marching behind their PE teacher through the Paris streets, and at every corner a couple boys run off in another direction, until only a couple are left; and the sight of even younger children mesmerized by a puppet show, the camera hidden somewhere on stage, the kids' eyes wider than saucers. Even though in the end we watch Doinel risk his future even more by escaping his court-mandated military academy and running to the sea coast, it all stays light in tone, never becoming some heavy-handed melodramatic indictment of a system where children slip through the cracks. Indeed it's The 400 Blows' famous non-ending that epitomizes Truffaut's commitment to the ambiguities of realism, with Antoine freeze-framed by the sea, an open-ended question mark that segues into the eventual series better than they could've imagined.

Despite such a turbulent genesis, it's not as though Antoine ends up habitually on the street or as a career criminal. Just as kids can end up virtually disowned and in reform school despite their best intentions, abandoned youths can end up making a respectable life for themselves, and in the "Antoine and Colette" sequence of Love At 20 we switch gears from the drama of child neglect to the tribulations of young love. We now find Antoine in his late teens back in Paris, steadily rising among the ranks at a record factory, and no less passionate about the arts. (Though Truffaut does offer the occasional flashback to fill in some of the blanks, much has been elided between the first film and this one; it's almost as though it took us this long to find him again.) Frequenting concerts on classical and more contemporary musical trends, he recognizes an attractive girl his age who attends as often as he does, and soon pursues her romantically.

It's a refreshing change of pace from the weightier portents of Blows; here the course of a life isn't necessarily at stake, just the sentimental education of a young man so determined he moves to an apartment across the street from her. Antoine's luck doesn't seem to have improved though, and the object of his affections is blithely indifferent to his advances. He instead receives a great deal more attention from Colette's parents, and in winning a new adoptive family there is a victory of sorts.

Our young Antoine turns out to be a painfully romantic sort, and next in Stolen Kisses we find he enlisted in the military simply to distance himself from another girl who failed to reciprocate his feelings. His congenital problems with authority and regimentation, so evident in The 400 Blows, prove contrary to a successful career in the armed forces, and he's discharged after three years for having gone AWOL numerous times. Returning to Paris in this third installment (and the first in color), he gravitates not back to Christine, who spurned him, but to her parents, who were as warm and accommodating as Colette's parents were. It's here that Antoine's character truly starts fleshing out, and Truffaut is to be commended for refusing to make his cinematic projection an ideal one. This young-twentysomething Antoine is directionless and impulsive in many ways, while simultaneously exhibiting a great deal of emotional maturity and self-awareness.

Thus while he struggles to keep a steady job for a respectable period of time, trying out being a night watchman, a private investigator, and a TV repairman (while never regretting his interrupted education), we still find women throwing themselves at him, including the mesmerizing Delphine Seyrig, wife of a shoe store owner (for whom Antoine is working undercover to ascertain if his employees truly dislike him). Somehow Antoine generates enough charm to even ultimately change Christine's mind, and in the end he has to choose between the glamorous older mistress and the young highly-marriageable ingenue. This signals we've subtly passed from the preoccupations of the French New Wave into a more traditional realm of French cinema, and one of Truffaut's best: the romantic comedy.

Once one gets settled, however, restlessness can creep in from the margins, and we find the tables turned in Bed and Board. This time it's Antoine committing adultery, becoming enchanted with a statuesque Japanese girl long after he becomes a husband and father with Christine. The film opens with him now a modest florist, still enjoying his records, and hoping their son becomes the writer he feels he never had a chance to become. Eventually he abandons his tiny flower shop for a curious job piloting via remote control miniature model boats for a corporation hoping to lure international investors to build larger versions, and among their visitors is a Japanese firm whose staff includes a young lady whom Antoine doesn't think twice of courting.

Thus the normalcy we applauded Antoine for achieving against the odds turns out to be all too normal, and we are shown how adultery is a way of life in Paris and everywhere. (We fear how the dissolution of his marriage will harm his relationship with his beloved in-laws, but a brief trip to a brothel, where Antoine runs into Christine's father, demonstrates that the status quo was hardly what he imagined either.) What proves saddening is how badly Antoine seemingly yearned for a family in the past, and how readily he'd sacrifice that domesticity for a dalliance in the exotic. But Truffaut insists everyone be revealed in all their humanity, warts and all, while still angling for as happy an ending as possible.

It's near the end that, amidst the chaos of his marital life, Antoine is finally motivated to start writing his first novel, which, after four films, is a pleasant and natural development. (Truffaut made The 400 Blows at age 27, creating parallels in their artistic careers; it bears mentioning that by this time both Jean-Pierre and his director also bore an uncanny physical resemblance to each other.) And though it may be only out of Antoine's unhappiness that art can finally be produced, Truffaut never fails to sprinkle the last two films with his trademark touches of whimsy. Behold how his camera follows the trajectory of a letter through pneumatic postal tubes beneath Paris (are they still in use?) in Stolen Kisses, or the discovery of Christine's kooky secret admirer, or Antoine's somewhat inept tailing of his subjects during his short stint with a detective firm, and you can witness the touch of a master thoroughly in love with the small moments only the cinema can capture. (It's this same love that inserts a cameo by Jacques Tati on a metro platform as Antoine realizes his wife is pregnant.) Despite how one's life turns out, and how one's priorities evolve, there is always humor to be found. We can only hope that, as Antoine finally tires of his Asian mistress, that it was all worth it.

It's Christine who suggests that Antoine took on his novel (entitled Love and Other Troubles) to get even with his parents after all these years, but Truffaut is less interested with resolving psychological issues per se. He's in the business of composing human portraits, and in the fifth and final installment, Love On The Run, he brings us a swansong filled with surprises only possible from a twenty-year-long labor of love. Now a published author and finalizing his divorce from Christine, Antoine holds a day job managing a printshop and is still all thumbs with his new girlfriends. In flashbacks we learn that both Christine and Antoine may have (separately) fooled around with a mutual female friend during their marriage (remember, no one's perfect) and that, even after the divorce, there is still a lot of love between the two. For all his perceptiveness, it's only now that Antoine realizes his psychology in romantic engagements: "I fall for girls with nice parents," he confesses, "I fall for the whole family."

Speaking of parents, two decades later we finally learn what happened to his own. To our shock he runs into a Monsieur Lucien, the man Antoine saw his mom kissing on the street in The 400 Blows, and Lucien reveals that his mother died while Antoine was in an army jail, and his father died in 1971. He also crosses paths again with Colette, who is now a lawyer but is not without skeletons in her own closet. She picks up a copy of Antoine's book, and disputes Antoine's interpretation of how their relationship turned out. (I watched all seven hours of the Doinel series in one sitting - one can only imagine what a rush it was for audiences in the theater to see all these characters again after so many years.) Like all the other movies, Love On The Run by no means ends the way you expect, but life on Truffaut's screen is hardly as tidy as Hollywood would have us believe. (Witness Truffaut's own abrupt ending in 1984, from cancer at age 52.)

It turns out I wrote a paper in college on the impact The 400 Blows had on the cinematic scene, never knowing that the film was also part of a larger whole. I wonder if, had I seen all five films back in my early twenties, I'd've been able to look past Antoine's various missteps (college kids, yet devoid of the scars one receives outside of the ivory tower, are in need of a reality check or two) and recognized the bravery of such a portrait, spanning from elementary school to one's first divorce - now at thirty-one, I myself couldn't stand up to such scrutiny. Back in 1992 I praised the first installment for its "intimacy and genuineness," its "honesty and unsentimental methods." Did I know what any of that truly meant yet? Truffaut's "spiritual autobiography" basically ends in the same spirit as that freeze-frame in Blows, and perhaps this consistency illustrates best how personal the project was; to quote George Sadoul, writing in 1959 on how revolutionary the film was, he is unknowingly speaking for the entire Antoine Doinel series:

There is neither a 'happy ending' nor an 'unhappy
ending.' It's an 'open end' with a question mark.
It's just fine that way . . . this story flows along like
life.

He had no idea.

                                                                 © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004