Great Film overall

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The movie focuses an intermezzo in the life of a young guy who is in search of himself and apparently doesn't succeed to find himself from the begin to the end of the intermezzo. His first failure is with the military service. He volunteered by himself (nobody forced him to serve in the army, he thought that it was a possible move) but a few time later, realized that the career in the army had nothing to do with himself and didn't feared to be discharged dishonourably. During the hole intermezzo, he is in love with a girl who doesn't care about him. He experiments several professional activities and fails to succeed in all of them, not because he is stupid, but, rather, because he refuses to play the role that each professional activity demands. The outsider trait of his personality always prevails. This outsider style doesn't lead him to any kind of progress or evolution. He is the same from the begin to the end, and this fact is negative in the sens that he is not an example to be followed by any one who is also in search of himself. The first time I saw baisers volés, more than 45 years ago, I was fascinated by the nouvelle vague and didn't pay attention to the aspects I pointed out here above. Now that I'm more experienced in existential issues, I'm more connected to these aspects. To conclude my critics, I would like to say that the song of Charles Trenet, "Que Reste-t-il de Nos Amours", is much more beautiful and profound than the tribulations of the young outsider Antoine Doinel.

A dweeb who lacks charisma gets dishonorably discharged from the army, and then goes through a series of different jobs and women. This is as much plot as you'll get in this typical French (read = European) drama without a plot or a real point.But hang on. After finishing the movie, I was informed by various movie catalogs that this is a comedy. Comedy?!! Leonard Maltin calls this an "alternately touching and hilarious film". Touching and hilarious? What movie was he watching??? I tell you, there is absolutely NOTHING touching about this movie. The movie is emotionally uninvolving. And there wasn't one funny moment in the entire picture – unless you consider French humour funny. In fact, French humour is so unfunny that it is difficult for the non-connoisseur to even identify which bits are supposed to be funny. Maltin was probably referring, for example, to the early scene when an elderly detective catches a customer's wife cheating on him with another man. Is this supposed to be funny? Good Lord, if this is funny what isn't? It's a badly-directed scene with bad acting, absurd reactions by the characters, haphazardly put together. And that's funny… Maltin further "informs" us that the dweeb is "inept but likable". Likable?! This man is so charismatic he makes the likes of Kyle MacLachlan seem like Sean Connery of Clark Gable by comparison. In another movie catalog I am informed that the dweeb is more-or-less Truffaut himself, i.e. the movie is autobiographical. Fair enough. If Truffaut was a dweeb, that's his problem. I am also informed by BOTH reviews that this movie is considered as Truffaut's best by many!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What are his other movies like then… Don't get me wrong. The movie is by no means a disaster. It is watchable, which is the most important thing, and the photography is solid. But there is nothing here that will make you laugh (unless you laugh at other French films), and there is certainly nothing touching here. The dweeb sleeps with prostitutes, falls in "love" easily, flirts for years with a girl who is probably frigid and played by an actress who is probably even less interesting than he is. A stone-faced actress. Which brings me to the acting. Some of the cast aren't particularly good. And Truffaut, the "great director", occasionally offers us scenes that are, for want of a better word, "off". There is clumsiness in the editing, and clumsiness in scenes with many characters.If you could just forget that this was done by one of the supposed "greats of cinema", and watch this without knowing anything about the movie, you'd have to be lying if you thought this was anything but an average movie.By the way, Maltin also calls this "one of the best treatments of young love ever put on the screen". This comes from a man who thinks that "Teenage Caveman" is a better movie than "Blade Runner". 'Nuff said.(Sick and tired of bad European dramas? Email me, and I'll send you my altered subtitles for various Bergman films, plus "Der Untergang".)

As soon as "Stolen Kisses" begins, it makes a claim to being one of the most charming movies of all time. There's a lilting French jazz song on the soundtrack and a shot of the Eiffel Tower against a blue sky—a perfect introduction to this comedy about the crazy things people do for love. It's a gentle, loosely structured movie, sometimes farcical and always sweet-natured.Main character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud, of course) is now in his early twenties and has a job at a private detective agency whose clients tend to be jealous or broken-hearted lovers. His own love life isn't in much better shape, though: he has an on-and-off relationship with a cute violin student named Christine (Claude Jade), but with many distractions along the way. The most important is Fabienne Tabard (Delphine Seyrig), the beautiful, elegant wife of a shoe-store owner (played by a very droll Michel Lonsdale) who has hired the detective agency to investigate why nobody loves him.Though the tone of this movie is very different from that of its excellent predecessor "The 400 Blows," that's not a bad thing. It's nice to know that Antoine can make a generally respectable life for himself, rather than becoming embittered or hardened from his experiences as a juvenile delinquent. He's acquired a sense of humor that helps him get through tough situations—he doesn't get angry when the army gives him a dishonorable discharge, he grins! But enough traces of the old "400 Blows" Antoine remain to let us know it's the same character: the haplessness, the intensity, the love of Balzac. Léaud's performance is extremely winning--how nice that the child actor has turned into a leading man with a talent for comedy.The ending of "Stolen Kisses" is a little abrupt and undermotivated: we never learn why Christine decides she wants Antoine back, nor why Antoine realizes that Christine is "the one." But these kind of quibbles seem mean-spirited—really, could this charming romance end any other way than with the two lovers strolling through a park, accompanied by that same nostalgic jazz song?

It is incredible how well this film has held up over the years, and how it continues to fill you with all the spirit of hope and exultation that was part of l'epoque. This is not an overtly political film, though there are passing references to and images of the contemporary demonstrations which would shake France to its core in May of '68. Nonetheless, it captures spectacularly well the revolutionary feel of the times and makes perfectly understandable why Truffaut and Godard would call for the cancellation of the Cannes Festival of 1968. Nothing could go on has it had in the past after May '68, and "Stolen Kisses" itself was a statement of that refusal. The film is perhaps the best political film of the upheaval of that period for at least two reasons: 1) the attitude towards work: Antoine Doinel passes from job to job without a second thought, not worrying himself about a "career," and with a playful attitude that seemed inspired by Guy Debord's slogan of "ne travaillez jamais" ("never work"); 2) the attitude towards life in general: the film reflects that sensibility of the '68 movement that "everything is possible", that life can be lived as one adventure after another (as opposed to the dreary workaday life proffered by the bourgeoisie), that the craziest things can happen to you and that you should be open to taking them into your life (e.g., Christine falling in love with Antoine and vice versa). The lightness of the film is its greatest quality, for it suggests that all those "heavy" structures, physical, psychological, political and societal, can be overcome ("sous les pavés, la plage"/"beneath the pavement lies the beach") and life can be recovered.