François Truffaut's LOVE ON THE RUN finds the director's alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), in his mid-30s. Relatively content with his young, beautiful lover, Sabine (Dorothée), Antoine still runs from woman to woman, looking to fill the gap in his life – a void that exists because of his inability to commit in relationships and because of his mother's recent death. As Antoine gains self-awareness, slowly comprehending the reasons for his emptiness, he reflects back on his various relationships. These experiences are related in part through black-and-white flashbacks dictated by the pages of his semiautobiographical book, LES SALADES DE L'AMOUR, and also in his current life as Antoine actively seeks out people and places from his past and attempts to reinvent them in the present. This process involves his first love, Collette (Marie-France Pisier); his second love, Christine (Claude Jade), who eventually became his wife and birthed his son, Alfonse; and his wife's violin student, Liliane (Dani). With a mixture of frank dialogues about fidelity, love, and scholarship (Antoine works in a book printing house to which he is, occasionally, quite committed) and brilliant camerawork that combines deliberate framing--panes of glass, windows, mirrors, doorways, and gates that communicate the way Antoine distances himself from things--with smooth transitions to flashbacks, future events, and dream sequences, the viewer gets a direct line into Antoine's subconscious. In this manner of reflecting back and then inching forward chapter by chapter, LOVE ON THE RUN concludes the five-film Antoine Doinel saga in the same playfully endearing fashion that is signature of Truffaut's entire body of work.
