“The texture of the movie is false”: the 1970 sequel that Pauline Kael saw as a “sad progression”
Pauline Kael made a few enemies in her time as one of the most truthful film critics in America, but it was her reluctance to hold back, to really dig into why a film didn’t work – at least in her opinion – that made her so reliable.
She stood her ground, which is how she ended up in the proverbial burn book of filmmakers like Ridley Scott and George Lucas. The critic went in hard on Star Wars, finding it to have all the grace of a children’s circus, and in response, Lucas crafted the villainous character General Kael for Willow. But Kael was never going to bow down to filmmakers and place them on a pedestal simply because they made big movies.
Even directors who had changed everything, like French New Wave auteur François Truffaut, couldn’t expect themselves to be immune from Kael’s pen. While she appreciated his debut feature, The 400 Blows, as the director added sequels to his coming-of-age series, she found herself less and less engaged with his ideas.
The Antoine Doinel series saw Truffaut return to his beloved semi-autobiographical protagonist over the years, whom he’d first introduced in The 400 Blows back in 1959, played by 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud. In 1962, Truffaut delivered the 32-minute sequel Antoine and Colette, which, like the first film, borrowed many elements from the filmmaker’s youth. In this instance, he was inspired by a teenage infatuation he had with a woman whom he went as far as living opposite, just so he could see her.
Then came Stolen Kisses in 1968, which saw Antoine get engaged to the latest object of his affection, Christine, although not without bumping into Colette, now a wife and a mother. The movie was pretty well-received, giving audiences much more to bite into compared to the initial half-hour sequel Truffaut had delivered years earlier. But then, just two years later, he released another sequel, Bed and Board – and Kael was not on board at all.
Her main issue was that Truffaut seemed to be losing sight of the Antoine we once knew and loved, no matter how difficult he could be. With every film, Kael felt like the director strayed from the autobiographical elements of the character that really buoyed the narrative of each film, leaving us with an unconvincing portrait.
“The problem in the Doinel series started, I think, when Truffaut stopped seeing Antoine as a surrogate,” she wrote. “What had begun in The 400 Blows as a portrait of the artist as an impetuous, driven young boy turned into wayward vignettes of a tame, odd, somewhat withdrawn young man seeking conventional happiness – Antoine getting comic jobs and losing them in fluky ways, Antoine’s marriage and baby, Antoine’s infidelity, and so on.”
The Oscar-nominated 1996 role Helena Bonham Carter turned down because the director was “a weirdo”
The “hideous” 2013 role that finally made Sarah Paulson feel like a star: “She was so despicable”
“Present and raw and naked and exquisite”: the one acting performance Gillian Anderson needs everyone to see
Adding, “When Antoine arrives at the limited view of life and the gag humour of Bed and Board, the viewer may ask, ‘But is this where that marvellous child was heading? Is this dry insularity all that’s left of his strength? Why isn’t he outgoing anymore?'”
“Despite the comic surface, it’s a sad progression – a contraction of Antoine’s possibilities.”
Pauline Kael on Bed and Board
Even worse was Love on the Run, the final instalment in the series, which came out in 1979 and utilised many clips from the previous movies to pad out the runtime. But to Kael, Bed and Board would always be the most offensive, because it seemed to fail in every aspect.
“It isn’t just that Truffaut doesn’t have much to say about Antoine anymore, but that one doesn’t believe what he says,” Kael concluded, “The texture of the movie is false.”
