Stolen Kisses

11 yrs 91 minutes • 1968 • 7.5

François Truffaut's debut film The 400 Blows (1959) came together with Jean-Luc Godards Breathless (1960) to become the launching pad for the historically influential French new wave, a movement that emphasized the director's personal peculiarities and artistic freedoms. It is also the first part of an autobiographical film cycle including four films in which actor Jean-Pierre Léaud embodies the director's alter ego Antoine Doinel. In the Oscar-nominated Stolen Kisses (1968), in this second part of the cycle, Doinel has grown up to be a young man strolling around the lively streets of Paris. Airy poetic, subtly erotic, humorous, nostalgic and in a more lighthearted way than the serious debut, Truffaut enlists the Parisian urban environment in a tumultuous era and a young man's complicated emotional life in this beautiful depiction of love.