Bed and Board

"Hello, Antoine. Still with the colors?" Further developments of an uneasy adulthood, François Truffaut and stand-in suspended between charm and sourness. Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in the courtyard, applying red dye to pale flowers when the camera looks up at a grousing tenant and then down again, et voilà, a crimson bouquet. (Clair is the mainstay, with sprinklings of Becker.) "Floral art" is the craft, he unwinds in bed by nicknaming the lopsided breasts of the wife (Claude Jade), a pert music instructor. Good terms with the in-laws ("I enjoy parents, as long as they're not mine"), a literary future for the baby boy ("Victor Hugo or nothing"). Enter "Mademoiselle Butterfly" (Hiroko Matsumoto), who catches his eye at the American hydraulic company where he maneuvers toy boats. Une affaire à la japonaise, "if I commit suicide with someone, I'd like it to be you." (The missus finds out, and awaits in full geisha getup.) A premature middle-age for the protagonist or an extended adolescence for the filmmaker, in either case a sitcom of weary winsomeness. The operatic diva next door, the creeping subletter who does impressions of Delphine Seyrig, a life of domestic skits. Banished from the bedroom to the living-room floor, the aspiring novelist litters his mattress with scribbled notes for a future roman à clef. "If you use art to settle accounts, it's no longer art." The mysterious client from Belle de Jour is briefly seen, a view of the train station gives a minute of M. Hulot, not Jacques Tati "but an incredible simulation." (Truffaut the film critic makes amends with Ford, a billboard for "Les Cheyennes" towers in an overcast Parisian avenue.) "You're my little sister, my daughter, my mother." "I'd have liked to be your wife, too." Pialat's Le Garçu might be something of a belated rebuke. Cinematography by Néstor Almendros. With Daniel Ceccaldi, Claire Duhamel, Silvana Blasi, Daniel Boulanger, Pierre Fabre, Barbara Laage, Claude Véga, and Jacques Jouanneau.