Love on the Run (1979, François Truffaut) (Patreon)

51/100

Second viewing, last seen 1999. Hard to get past this being an Antoine Doinel clip show, what with roughly a third of its length taken up by footage from prior installments. It's not even as if Truffaut deploys his flashbacks creatively—most of them are triggered by the visual cliché of zooming into a closeup as the actor assumes a "reflective" expression. That nearly a decade had elapsed since Bed and Board does create an interesting structure, suggesting e.g. the existence of a hypothetical film about the Liliane affair that might have been released around 1977. (Dani reprising the role she played in Day for Night makes it odder still, as if there's a whole Truffaut Cinematic Universe. Plus Christine and Liliane are allegedly working on Rohmer's Perceval!) And I was first perplexed, then amused when Colette's Stolen Kisses cameo shows up stripped of color, presumably so as to match "Antoine and Colette" (which is b&w). Actually, Love on the Run is strongest during the stretches when it seems to be more about Colette than about Antoine; Pisier's barely even recognizable as the haughty kid she'd created in '62, which comes across as genuine maturation rather than artistic incoherence. (More resonant still if you're familiar with Truffaut's biography and know what the "real" Colette—whose name was Liliane, significantly—meant to him.) By and large, though, this feels like a project that was spinning its wheels, and the happy ending it engineers for Antoine rings a bit false (though I quite like that the "wholly invented" story he tells Colette gets revealed as just more of his own romantic history; there's a sort of confession there). Kinda doubt that Truffaut would have left it at that had he lived a normal lifespan, but Léaud's grumpy auteur in Irma Vep is probably the closest we'll get to what might have been.