Stolen Kisses

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

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 an evident affection for Paris and its people, dedicating the film to the embattled Cinémathèque française and threading it with his love of cinema itself.

Made in the turbulent year of 1968, the film offers a deliberately tender counterpoint to its moment, finding comedy and grace in the ordinary confusions of love and work. Its influence on the bittersweet romantic comedy is wide, and Léaud's Doinel remains one of cinema's great recurring characters. Charming, humane and quietly wise about youthful folly, Stolen Kisses is Truffaut at his most endearing. Léaud's Doinel would return in further films, but this remains the most beloved chapter, a perfect distillation of Truffaut's tenderness toward youth and Paris. Dedicated to the embattled Cinémathèque française, it is suffused with Truffaut's love of cinema and of Paris, and remains a perennial audience favourite.