Garp
Well-known member
- Messages
- 1,104
- Reaction score
- 180
- Trophy Points
- 68
'Bed and Board' [1970]
Skip ahead a couple of years. Antoine and Christine are newly-weds, living in a crowded but friendly apartment block in Paris. He works as a florist, dyeing flowers and she gives violin lessons. When a baby enters the picture, Antoine's roving eye manifests itself again and he starts an affair with a Japanese woman.
Truffaut directs this next instalment of Doinel's life with a light touch. It's less obviously amusing than 'Stolen Kisses', but it is whimsical and zips along quite merrily. The courtyard of their apartment block is reminiscent of Hitchcock's 'Rear Window', although we get to know their neighbours directly here. There is the woman openly out to bed Antoine, the mute stranger they talk menacingly about behind his back (until they discover his semi-fame and embrace him) and the exasperated older couple next door. As previously, Antoine meanders from one job to another, forever to be a man-child, it seems. He is petty and brash, unclear about what he wants. More than ever, he reminds me of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom here, a fascinating but frustrating character study.
There are some interesting long takes and some surreal sequences (does Christine actually transform herself into a geisha?), but otherwise it's a lazy Sunday kind of film. With chemistry as well-matched as Jean-Pierre Leaud and Claude Jade, that's good enough for me.
Skip ahead a couple of years. Antoine and Christine are newly-weds, living in a crowded but friendly apartment block in Paris. He works as a florist, dyeing flowers and she gives violin lessons. When a baby enters the picture, Antoine's roving eye manifests itself again and he starts an affair with a Japanese woman.
Truffaut directs this next instalment of Doinel's life with a light touch. It's less obviously amusing than 'Stolen Kisses', but it is whimsical and zips along quite merrily. The courtyard of their apartment block is reminiscent of Hitchcock's 'Rear Window', although we get to know their neighbours directly here. There is the woman openly out to bed Antoine, the mute stranger they talk menacingly about behind his back (until they discover his semi-fame and embrace him) and the exasperated older couple next door. As previously, Antoine meanders from one job to another, forever to be a man-child, it seems. He is petty and brash, unclear about what he wants. More than ever, he reminds me of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom here, a fascinating but frustrating character study.
There are some interesting long takes and some surreal sequences (does Christine actually transform herself into a geisha?), but otherwise it's a lazy Sunday kind of film. With chemistry as well-matched as Jean-Pierre Leaud and Claude Jade, that's good enough for me.