Stolen Kisses

Stolen Kisses (1968) is the third instalment in François Truffaut's autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle, and it returns to the character first seen as a boy in The 400 Blows, now a young man stumbling through early adulthood. Warm, funny and a little melancholy, it earned an Academy Award nomination and is among the best-loved films of the New Wave.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut's on-screen alter ego, plays Antoine as he drifts from job to job (most memorably as an inept private detective), torn between the steady Christine (Claude Jade) and an unattainable older woman played by Delphine Seyrig. Truffaut directs with a featherlight touch and obvious affection for Paris and its people. He dedicated the film to the embattled Cinémathèque française, and his love of cinema runs all the way through it.

It was made in the turbulent year of 1968, and its tenderness is a deliberate counterpoint to that moment: it finds comedy and grace in the ordinary confusions of love and work. Its influence on the bittersweet romantic comedy has been wide. Léaud's Doinel, one of cinema's great recurring characters, would return in further films, but Stolen Kisses is the best-loved chapter and Truffaut at his most endearing, wise about youthful folly without ever lecturing anyone about it. It has remained a perennial audience favourite, a distillation of Truffaut's tenderness towards youth and towards Paris.