“Love on the Run” is the fifth and final installment in the Antoine Doinel series of films directed by Francois Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Leaud. In it, Doinel is once again struggling to find, maintain, and understand love in all its multifaceted capabilities.
At the start we find him in an affair with a record-store clerk (Dorothee) who is very beautiful but frustratingly stand-offish at times. His marriage to his wife Christine (Claude Jade) is ending in divorce. Furthermore, old acquaintances/love-objects (Marie-France Pisier) are reappearing in his life much to his confusion and our amusement.
This is truly the most experimental of the five Doinel films in that Truffaut resorts to inserting flashbacks from the previous four films to iterate and express lingering memories of the principle character and to highlight the major thematic similarities running through the current film vis-a-vis the past ones. The flashbacks are appropriate to the filmic structure and envelope the film with effortless verisimilitude. They comment on the present film’s actions in ways that draw increased understanding and knowledge.
As we will learn, love to Doinel is a vital, energizing force that he can’t live without. To be loveless is to be dead in Doinel’s terms. Leaud’s performance, as in all the installments, is perfect in its embodiment of a boy/man who is constantly learning about himself but can never quite quantify his love education in a collective, verbalized idea.
At this stage in the cycle, Doinel is now a published author and his book “Les Salades des Amours” is purchased by his flame from the “Antoine and Colette” film, Colette (Pisier). She is now a lawyer and after a reunion on a night train they are forced to reassess their present state of affairs and their collective past.
This is a fantastic end to a wonderful series of films. Its inventiveness with flashbacks is unparalleled because there has been no series of films quite like this. This is not the best in the Antoine Doinel cycle but it is entertaining and entirely satisfying.
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