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| Jean
Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Marie-France Pisier,
Dorothée |
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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):
The truth of the matter is, I fall in love with the whole family:
father,
mother... I like girls with nice parents.
After divorcing his wife Christine,
Antoine Doinel bumps into his first love Colette while going through
a crisis in his current relationship.
 The
fifth and final film in Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle is an attempt
to bring some form of closure to the notoriously self-obsessed
anti-hero's story, besides which it offers a kind of recap of previous
events through the incorporation of long scenes from the four preceding
pictures. While one can understand the attraction Truffaut must
have felt to the utilization of images from this unique chronicle
in such a fashion, it's an experiment that never really works,
and the film was criticized for playing like a 'Greatest Hits'
collection of earlier films rather than an independent feature
in its own right. To be sure, there are still enough fine moments
of Léaud at his best. But the film's more leisurely pace and reliance
on older material clearly illustrate how the director has lost
interest in Doinel and is eager to bring his story to an end. |
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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. This
last, and most recently filmed instalment is rather unsurprisingly
one of the best-looking in the set, though its use of so
many clips from previous films gives the film as a whole
an inconsistent look. Especially the shots from the first
two films, which were shot in black-and-white with a 'scope
ratio, look forced and unnatural in this context.
The original mono sound mix is presented in Dolby Digital
1.0 and has the best fidelity of all the films in the set.
The extras specific to this
disc include two excellent interviews, both
featuring director François Truffaut. In the first, he is
joined by actress and co-screenwriter Marie-France Pisier
(who plays Colette in the film), interviewed together for
a 1979 TV show that resembles a cheerful cinema sit-in. The
other interview is also taken from French TV, recorded in
1980, and finding Truffaut intensely critical of the last
picture in the Doinel cycle. He talks about what he considers
the lack of any true development of his main character throughout
the series of films, and the failure of the last film to
gel as a whole, describing Love on the Run as 'a
failed experiment'. The theatrical trailer,
again doing a superlative job of taking numerous
scene segments out of context to suggest an amusing alternate
narrative.
[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
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