Actor

Daniel Boulanger

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

Shoot the Piano Player

François Truffaut · 1960

François Truffaut’s 1960 second feature adapts David Goodis’s Down There into a grainy, kinetic neo-noir starring Charles Aznavour as a pianist hiding from fame and grief. Shot on location in Paris and the Alps by Raoul Coutard, edited with jarring cuts and voice-over digressions, and scored by Georges Delerue, it balances burlesque gangsters with quiet despair. Its themes — anonymity, misrecognition, love as shelter — unfold through mood and gesture more than plot. Though narratively loose, its emotional logic holds firm.

13:00

Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard · 1960

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut sends a car thief who idolises American gangsters, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, on the run through Paris after he shoots a policeman, hiding out with an American girlfriend played by Jean Seberg who is unsure whether to protect him or turn him in. Shot handheld on repurposed still-camera film stock with almost no lighting, and cut with jump cuts that were reportedly not planned during filming, it became one of the founding statements of the French New Wave.