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| Jean
Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Delphine Seyrig, Michael Lonsdale,
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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Catherine: I followed her to 18
Place d'Anvers, where she stayed for an hour and a half.
M. Blady: To whose apartment did she go?
Catherine: I don't know, there are a lot of apartments—
Antoine: I know where she was.
After a dishonorable discharge from
the army, Antoine Doinel holds a succession of jobs while engaging
in his first amorous adventures.
 The
third film of Truffaut's to feature the character of Antoine Doinel
as its protagonist, the astoundingly successful Stolen Kisses was
the first to feature actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as a young adult.
Its playful mixture of bittersweet comedy with unpredictable romantic
encounters is never less than entertaining, and sometimes hysterically
funny. But it's an entirely different breed of film from the more
universal themes of painful adolescence that were explored in The
400 Blows and Antoine and Colette. The appeal of Stolen
Kisses lies in Doinel's eccentricity and feeble connection
to his environment, which leads to an assortment of misunderstandings
and misadventures that are never less than amusing. The film's
general air of inconsequentiality is offset however by the moments
of sincerity and the film's refusal to smooth over the character's
many contradictions and paradoxes. |
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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. Image
quality for this second feature-length entry in the Doinel
cycle is absolutely superb, with outstanding detail and
only the occasional bit of wear and tear to the source print
and some very fine, natural-looking grain detracting from one
of the most outstanding visual presentations in the collection.
The original mono sound mix has been cleaned up very nicely,
neither lacking in depth nor overly distorted in quality.
The extras on the second
disc in the Antoine Doinel box set are doubly interesting,
as
they deal not only with the film itself, but also with the
turbulent historical events that occurred in France while
the film was being made. Not only was the communjty of French
filmmakers in an uproar over the French government's sudden
dismissal of Henri Langlois, founder and director of the
Cinémathèque Française. Rare footage of the riots staged
by actors, directors and other supporters before and inside
the Cinémathèque is featured here, along with some text pages
adding appropriate historical context to the images. Even
more compelling is the footage of Truffaut addressing crowds
at the 1968 Cannes film festival (alongside other filmmakers
including Godard and Polanski), where they called for the
festival's cancellation out of solidarity with the students
and workers, who were currently on strike during one of the
nation's most turbulent months.
As the selections from an excellent TV interview tell
us, Truffaut worked double shifts - along with most of his
cast and crew - to keep producing Stolen Kisses while
dedicated to fighting a battle whose importance they valued
above that of any single film. There's also an excellent introduction to
the film by Truffaut's friend and co-worker Serge Toubiana
on the disc as an optional prelude to the film.
[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 Stolen
Kisses.
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