Stolen Kisses · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two people at a table, buttering toast.

They pass things. The butter, the jam, a cup. They hardly speak. It is the morning after Antoine Doinel and Christine Darbon have finally spent a night together, and Truffaut plays it as household logistics: who reaches for what, how you arrange two bodies at a table that used to seat one. Nothing is decided. Nothing is even said. It's the scene from Stolen Kisses people remember longest, and by the ordinary rules of how movies work it shouldn't exist, because it advances nothing.

Hold onto it. It explains the whole loose, funny, faintly heartbroken picture.

Gilles Deleuze's two books on film turn on a single hinge, and you don't need the philosophy to feel it. In the older cinema, which he calls the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. See, react, alter. That circuit drives nearly everything made before the war. After the war it stops closing. People keep perceiving; their actions stop landing. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image and listed its symptoms. A dispersive situation: many characters, weakly tied. Weak links: causality slackens, scenes elide. And the balade, the stroll or trip that transforms nothing.

Stolen Kisses has all three inside twenty minutes. Antoine is discharged from the army, works nights at a shabby hotel, loses the job. Becomes a trainee detective. Then a television repairman. Agnès Guillemot, who was cutting Godard's films in the same years, enters scenes late and leaves early; whole weeks disappear between shots with no announcement. The people around him barely touch each other: Tabard the wretched shoe-shop owner, a magician, the old detective who dies abruptly on the job, Colette drifting in from a short film made six years earlier. Antoine wants a job, adulthood, Fabienne, Christine, and no wanting in this film has the power to produce its object.

Why put a vocabulary on it? Because it converts what has always been read as the film's weakness into its design. The standing complaint, made in 1968 and repeated since, is that the picture is slight and shapeless while the barricades were going up outside. The shapelessness is the shape, and Truffaut had a model for it: Sacha Guitry's The Story of a Cheat, a life told as a chain of digressions, image subordinated to the lightness of the telling. Guitry licenses scenes that lead nowhere. Deleuze explains why a film made of them can still hold together.

Detective plots were Deleuze's own example of what he called the small form: an act discloses a situation that had been hidden. That's every private-eye picture. Somebody does something, and the concealed shape of the world shows itself.

Truffaut installs the machinery and disconnects the disclosure. Georges Tabard walks into the Blady agency with a commission no investigation can complete: find out why nobody likes me. There is no fact under that question. The surveillance turns up mild infidelity and embarrassment, never revelation. Truffaut had spent 1966 publishing his book-length interviews with Hitchcock, and here he takes the master's grammar of the watcher and defuses it into farce.

That's an invention, not a shrug. The agency is the device that lets a plotless film keep moving: it manufactures pretexts to enter apartments, shops, magic acts, strangers' lives, so the film can be episodic without going formless. Doors carry the structural load that story usually carries; Antoine is perpetually admitted where he doesn't belong and shown out again. The grammar is Renoir's, lifted from The Rules of the Game, where the comedy is generated by who crosses which threshold and when. Truffaut rebuilt it as a business with a filing system.

Which brings back the toast. Deleuze's term is temps mort, dead time: passages a film holds onto although nothing in them advances anything. Older cinema cut this out. Truffaut makes it the payload. Almost every other exchange in the film is mediated: letters, reports, a telephone, the television set Antoine repairs, a name written down and stared at. The breakfast table is the one place where two people are simply present to each other, and it is nearly wordless. The plainest staging in the film is the part of it that has lasted.

Then the mirror. Antoine alone in his room, facing his reflection, chanting three names. Fabienne Tabard, Christine Darbon, Antoine Doinel. Over and over, until the words come apart into sound. The camera holds and the duration does the work.

Deleuze would call this a crystal-image, and the term earns its keep here. A crystal is an image in which you can't separate the actual thing from its double, and the two keep trading places. Antoine is addressing a virtual Antoine about two women who exist for him largely as images: he watches Fabienne through shop glass, and his eroticism is almost entirely optical. The third name he says is his own, as though he had to conjure himself into existence as well. The shot descends straight from the fixed-camera confessional in The 400 Blows, where the boy answered a psychologist's questions delivered at the lens. Nine years on, the same actor is still answering. Nobody is asking.

The crystal cracks, and Truffaut cracks it on purpose. Fabienne comes to his room and says, with tremendous precision, that she is not an apparition but a woman; she proposes terms, and leaves having reduced his delirium to a single afternoon. She steps out of the image and into speech, and that finishes her as a fantasy. Deleuze took the idea of the flaw in the crystal, the fissure through which something escapes into ordinary life, from Renoir. Truffaut named his production company after Renoir's The Golden Coach. The debt runs deeper than doors. So does the other one: Lubitsch, whose Trouble in Paradise put the erotic business behind a closed door or inside a cut, is the reason Truffaut can shoot around Fabienne's bedroom and make the discretion itself the joke.

Between these, the film takes two minutes off to follow a pneumatique through the compressed-air tubes under Paris, tracking the petit bleu down the chutes and through the machinery like a documentary: no people, pure movement, a machine ballet borrowed from the French avant-garde of the 1920s that Deleuze characterized by exactly this appetite for fluid mobility, currents and mechanisms. The joke is exact. The one system in the film that works flawlessly, that carries a message to its destination in a straight line, is municipal plumbing. It was obsolete within twenty years, and the film is now its record.

The last scene is a park bench. The silent stranger who has been trailing Christine all film finally speaks and declares a love that is absolute, permanent, definitive, against all the provisional people around them. Christine says the man is mad. Deleuze, borrowing from Peirce, separates a mark from a demark. A mark is an object or act that means what it customarily means: you see it, you know what follows. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the chain and forces you to interpret. Everything the stranger says is romantic comedy's standard closing move, the declaration, the vow, forever. Spoken by the wrong body at the wrong moment, it reads as illness. Truffaut ends by handing his genre's most reliable gesture to a lunatic and declining to confirm the diagnosis.

What did the film do to film? It proved a picture could be built as a chain of set-pieces with no antagonist, no reversal and no third act, and be loved for sixty years; it is remembered in pieces because it was made in pieces. And it consolidated something almost nobody had attempted: serial autofiction, one actor playing one character across twenty years, aging on camera in real time. The device was tested in the sketch Antoine and Colette, where the gap between installments was carried entirely by the visible change in Léaud's body and voice, with no expository recap. What that buys you is time presented directly rather than as the measure of events. Linklater's Before films and Boyhood are the descendants, as are Desplechin's Paul Dédalus films. Léaud himself became a citation other directors could cast, from Bertolucci and Eustache to Kaurismäki and Tsai Ming-liang, whose What Time Is It There? makes the reference its subject.

One thing to carry in with you. Truffaut shot this in the winter of 1968, during the weeks he was fighting to get Henri Langlois restored to the Cinémathèque, and the film opens on the padlocked gates at Chaillot with a dedication to him. Then it walks away and never mentions politics again. Watch the doors: who opens them, who is shown out. Watch the toast. And when the stranger on the bench announces a love that is permanent and definitive and gets called insane for it, consider that he is describing, fairly precisely, what the director was doing that February.