STOLEN KISSES

Directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari

François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, is a movie so full of love that to define it may make it sound like a religious experience, which, of course, it is - but in a wonderfully unorthodox, cockeyed way. Truffaut loves his characters - the well-meaning misfit with the private integrity, even paranoids: he loves movies - the people who make them and the people who preserve them (this film is dedicated to Henri Langlois of the Cinemathèque Française); he loves the craft of movies, and he loves - or, at least he accepts - the mortality of love itself.
It picks up the adolescent hero of The 400 Blows ten years later, after his discharge from the Army for being “temperamentally unfit,” and details his chaotic adventures around Paris as a hotel night clerk and then as a private eye of spectacular ineptitude. The movie at first seems to have a rather short focus, but because Truffaut is incapable of doing anything cheaply or flatly or vulgarly, it is soon apparent that Stolen Kisses is as humanistically complex as even Shoot the Piano Player, though more classically ordered in form. The focus is broad and deep and like all fine movies, Stolen Kisses has both social and political integrity that seem so casual as to appear unintentional. Léaud, who has been playing lightweight versions of this role in other movies (most recently in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le Départ), is quite marvelous as Antoine, whose face is part predatory cartoon cat, part saint, and very, very French. Delphine Seyrig is the cool and beautiful older woman who seduces Antoine in one of the most erotic, nonsex scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. Knowing that he has a crush on her she comes to his flat early o ne morning and points out, quite pragmatically, that since each of them is unique and exceptional, there is no reason they should not sleep together. He has to agree.

STOLEN KISSES IS ONE OF HIS BEST - STRONG, SWEET, WISE, AND OFTEN EXPLOSIVELY FUNNY.

the actors are so good one sometimes suspects that they, and not Truffaut, wrote their own lines. Michael Lonsdale is pricelessly funny as Miss Seyrig’s husband, a shoe store owner who asks the detective agency to find out why everyone—waitresses, taxicab drivers, his employees, and his wife—detests him. He is curious because there can’t possibly be any legitimate reason. Claude Jade, who looks like a dark-haired Catherine Deneuve, is Antoine’s sometime fiancée, and Harry Max is an elderly detective who sponsors Antoine in the trade. Antoine (whom Jean-Pierre Léaud plays here, as he did in The 400 Blows) is a kind of mid-sixties, Parisian Huckleberry Finn, committed to life if not to all of its rituals. Antoine, who is a physical and spiritual projection of Truffaut himself, is a constantly amazed observer and an enthusiastic participant, a fact that gives Stolen Kisses the perspective missing from so many other movies about youth seeking to connect. With what can only be described as cinematic grace, Truffaut’s point of view slips in and out of Antoine so that something that on the surface looks like a conventional movie eventually becomes as fully and carefully populated as a Balzac novel. There is not a silly or superfluous incident, character, or camera angle in the movie. Truffaut, however, is the star of the film, always in control, whether the movie is ranging into the area of slapstick, lyrical romance or touching lightly on DeGaulle’s France (a student demonstration on the TV screen). His love of old movies is reflected in plot devices (overheard conversations), incidental action (two children walking out of a drug store wearing Laurel and Hardy masks), and in the score, which takes Charles Trenet’s 1943 song, known here as “I Wish You Love,” and turns it into a joyous motif. The ending - as in a Hitchcock movie - should not be revealed. It’s a twist, all right, but not in plot. It simply italicizes everything that has gone before. Stolen Kisses is a movie I’ll cherish for a very long time, a lovely, human movie.

Directed by François Truffaut | written by (in French, with English subtitles) Mr. Truffaut, Bernard Revon, and Claude de Givray | cinematographer Denys Clerval | edited by Agnes Guillemot | music by Antoine Duhamel | art designer Claude Pignot | produced by Marcel Berbert | released by Lopert Films | Running time 90 minutes

- Vincent Canby