Screenwriter · Director · 1933

Claude de Givray

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

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

Le Beau Serge

Claude Chabrol, Philippe de Broca, Claude de Givray · 1958

Claude Chabrol’s 1958 debut follows François, a Parisian recovering from illness, as he returns to his rural hometown and tries—and fails—to rescue his alcoholic childhood friend Serge. Shot in winter in Sardent with documentary restraint, the film observes provincial life without sentiment or judgment, building its moral weight through silence, duration, and understated performances. It is less a story of redemption than of endurance, where care and harm blur, and salvation looks like dragging someone home through snow.

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.