LOVE ON THE RUN is a part 5 where everything comes together: Antoine’s early estrangement from his parents, the patterns of his failed relationships, the risks of putting his personal life (and therefore the people he knows’ personal lives) in his so-called fiction. In the opening we see him with a new girlfriend, Sabine (children’s singer and cartoon show host Dorothée), who he seems to be screwing it up with already. He obviously hurts her by cancelling their plans, without explaining why, but it’s to finalize his divorce with Christine (parts 3-4). So we get to see her again, and then OH SHIT, part 2 co-star Collette (Marie-France Pisier, also one of the screenwriters) happens to see him, finds out about his book, and reads it. And later he sees her and wants to talk to her again.
I’m not saying it’s FAST FIVE good, but it has a similar quality of uniting characters and threads from across the series and putting them into a story that’s in some ways more exciting and satisfying than previous entries. It also made me think of the fourth PHANTASM because of its liberal use of footage from when the actors were younger, though in PHANTASM it’s unused footage and here it’s almost like a clip show episode of a TV show. They keep bringing up things that happened in the past and then there’ll be a short clip from the movie where it happened. (Since this was pre-home video it was reasonable to expect that even if viewers had seen all the other ones it had been only once a long time ago.)
It’s also a little like ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO because in the midst of these flashbacks there are also flashbacks to things that happened between the last movie and this one, as if it’s clips from another sequel we never saw where they moved in with Christine’s lesbian friend. And of course bringing Collette and Christine together for a scene at the end is kinda like when Michael Dudikoff and David Bradley met up in AMERICAN NINJA 4. (read the rest of this shit…)
ANTOINE AND COLETTE, a.k.a. THE 401ST BLOW (not really), is only about half an hour long, ’cause it was originally the first segment of an anthology called WHEN YOU’RE 20 AND IN LOVE, with other ones directed by Shintaro Ishihara, Marcel Ophuls, Renzo Rossellini and Andrzej Wajda. I couldn’t find the whole thing, but they have DVDs that include just Truffaut’s segment along with THE 400 BLOWS or the earlier short LES MISTONS. It is the continued blowing adventures of Antoine (still Jean-Pierre Leaud). Patrick Auffay also returns as his best friend Rene, who now is in love with his cousin because she has short hair like Joan of Arc. I’m not sure if that was a French thing or a Truffaut thing. I’m gonna try not to judge. Anyway the two of them have a flashback to when they almost got caught smoking Rene’s dad’s cigars.
