ANTOINE AND COLETTE: Self Destructive Romanticism

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Francois Truffaut’s debut THE 400 BLOWS was a watershed moment in cinema. Not only is it credited as the start of the French New Wave of cinema, but it also brought a radically grittier and realistic take on childhood than was traditionally seen on film. Truffaut’s avatar of Antoine Doinel was adolescence at its most bleak, directionless, and downright heartbreaking.

While Truffaut would follow this with three other feature length films following the Antoine Doinel character (all played masterfully by Jean-Pierre Leaud), it’s his 30 minute short film, ANTOINE AND COLETTE, made for the anthology film LOVE AT TWENTY that is perhaps the most illuminating.

Centering on a now 17-year-old Antoine who lives alone and works at a record pressing plant, we follow Antoine and his attempts to woo Colette (Marie-France Pisier), a girl who he meets at a concert. 

A central facet of the Antoine character throughout the series is his insecurity and proclivity toward self-sabotage. For the first time, Antoine shows sign of peace with life, in no small part due to his sense of self ownership. The Antoine character, always a reflection of Truffaut himself, is a romantic at heart, viewing the most insignificant of details as signs of something more.

This is most telling in his interactions with his friend Rene upon first seeing Colette at a concert. He remarks “I didn’t speak to her, but I caught her eye.” From the start, Antoine projects his expectations of Colette onto her, something that continues for the rest of the short.

Once Antoine actually manages to talk to her and they regularly meet, his behavior becomes even more obsessive and borderline stalker-esque. He attends the same weekly concert and sits in the same rows expecting her to show despite her never confirming she’ll be there. He even moves across the street from her parent’s house in order to be closer to her.

Truffaut sets up a contrast between the physical distance between them and the emotional; the closer Antoine is to Colette physically, the less interested in him she is. The narration at one point remarks “She obviously didn’t feel being neighbors meant they should be any closer.” When he makes advances on her in a movie theater, she immediately pushes him off, despite him believing she would let him after giving her a newly pressed record (which would be the 1960’s French version of making a girl a mixtape?). 

All this tension culminates in the final scene, a dinner at Colette’s parent’s house. Antoine believes that he’s done everything right, most notably getting her parents to like him. However, she walks in with an older man, her new boyfriend. The couple heads out, leaving Antoine alone with her parents as the trio watch TV together. In a strange way, this is a parallel to THE 400 BLOWS, as Antoine finds himself among a family he doesn’t want to be with, trapped away from the life he wants.

Colette is never framed as the villain here, but rather the subject of Antoine’s failures to reconcile his own expectations with reality. In many ways, the film is best appreciated twice: once to view it as Antoine’ romantic rise and fall and another to see how Colette’s behavior has been consistently platonic leaning. ANTOINE AND COLETTE serves as a transition between the cinema verite of THE 400 BLOWS and the later films in the series, generating a trend of Antoine consistently failing in his relationships with women. At the end of the day, he’s still always the same kid at the end of THE 400 BLOWS, running toward some vague idea of happiness but never finding it.