Composer · 1925–2014

Antoine Duhamel

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Bed and Board

François Truffaut · 1970

François Truffaut’s 1970 film follows Antoine Doinel and Christine as newlyweds navigating Parisian domestic life: a cramped apartment, a faltering job, the birth of their son, and Antoine’s brief, hollow affair with a Japanese woman. Shot by Néstor Almendros with restrained naturalism, it avoids moralising or climax, instead observing the textures of habit, compromise, and quiet endurance. It is the fourth in Truffaut’s Doinel cycle and stands apart for its unblinking, unsentimental portrayal of marriage as daily practice rather than emotional event.

13:00

Stolen Kisses

François Truffaut · 1968

François Truffaut’s 1968 romantic comedy returns to Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel as a young man navigating love, work, and self-deception in Paris. Discharged from the army, he cycles through jobs — night clerk, private detective, TV repairman — while drifting between Christine Darbon and Fabienne Tabard. With Denys Clerval’s unshowy cinematography and Antoine Duhamel’s wistful score, the film traces how intimacy forms not through grand gestures but accumulated small returns: unanswered letters, staged breakdowns, silent proposals. It is the third in Truffaut’s five-film Doinel cycle, rooted in behavioural realism and quiet persistence.

13:00

Pierrot le Fou

Jean-Luc Godard · 1965

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Pierrot le Fou stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina as a couple fleeing Paris for the Mediterranean, pursued by gangsters and their own unraveling ideals. Shot by Raoul Coutard in vivid primary colours and edited with jarring, associative cuts, it abandons its source novel’s noir framework to become a pop-art-inflected meditation on love, language, and political fatigue. Its power lies in sensation over sense: the weight of a glance, the shock of blue paint, the silence after a firework.

13:00

Weekend

Jean-Luc Godard · 1967

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 Weekend follows a bourgeois couple’s disastrous road trip through a hallucinatory French countryside, where narrative collapses into allegory, history bleeds into farce, and revolution ends in cannibalism. Shot by Raoul Coutard and edited by Agnès Guillemot, it is a formally radical, politically abrasive essay-film that treats cinema as a site of ideological combat — not storytelling.