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| Jean
Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Daniel Ceccaldi, Claire Duhamel |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre
Léaud):
I know some people get bored, but I don't know what it means! There's
always something to do: cut the pages of a book, do crossword
puzzles, take notes... always something to do! I'd like a 30-hour
day because I am never bored! I wish I were 60. I'd only need 5
hours sleep!... I'm going to the toilet.
Antoine Doinel gets married and becomes
a father.
 The
fourth film in the Doinel cycle proceeds in a vein similar to the
preceding film Stolen Kisses, with neither marriage nor
fatherhood altering the fascinatingly erratic Antoine in any major
way. Drifting through his own life without taking much responsibility
for anything at all, Doinel is here revealed as the ultimate man-child:
feebly organizing his environment to suit his short-term desires
without much thought for what drives him or where his behavior
will ultimately get him. His unpredictability, again vividly embodied
by the mercurial Léaud, makes Bed and Board as
watchable as its predecessor, while its relatively stable dramatic
arc makes the film more cohesive than the episodic Stolen Kisses. |
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Available in the US from Fox/Lorber
in a non-anamorphic release without any extras, and in France
from MK2 in an anamorphic release with some supplements,
but English subtitles only for the feature film, and not
for the extras. The definitive release, with the best picture
quality and extras, is the edition included in the 'Adventures
of Antoine Doinel' five-disc box set from The Criterion Collection,
released in North-America without region encoding. The Criterion
disc served as the basis for this review.
The anamorphic widescreen
image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx. 1.66:1. Of
the five films in the 'Adventures of Antoine Doinel' box
set, Bed and Board has the poorest image quality.
Not only does the source print carry a distracting amount
of grain, but colors are strongly faded, and compression
errors cause many backgrounds to jitter unpleasantly. The
footage excerpted from this film within its sequel Love
on the Run actually looks a great deal better.
The original mono sound mix is presented in an uncluttered
Dolby Digital 1.0 mix that is mostly free of hiss or too
much distortion.
The extras on this third
disc in the set don't run very long or all that deep, but
they do offer a pleasant and varied look into the movie's
background and production. The TV interviews with
Truffaut and Léaud stress the fact that Bed and
Board was to be the final film in the Doinel cycle.
There's also a brief bit of on-set footage in
which we see Truffaut working with the main actors. Finally,
Who is Antoine Doinel? offers a basic introduction
to the previous films and their main characters.
[For a detailed look at the separate disc of extras, see the review of the first
disc in the set: The 400 Blows.] Like
the other discs in the box set, the animated main menu screen incorporates
a key scene from the film playing in focus in a window at the top
of the screen, and out of focus in the menu screen background.
Navigation design is superlative.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
August 25, 2003
Click
here for IMDB info on Bed
and Board.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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