this follow up to the 400 blows is a wonderful tale of young love. antoine and colette is the second in director francois truffaut’s antoine doinel series of five films. while this film is only a short it still manages to fit plenty of story into its brief running time.

we learn in the opening minutes that antoine was captured after the escape attempt that brought with it the close of the previous film in the series the 400 blows, and that in the years since antoine has somehow made it through the reform system and is now living the life he aspired to as a boy and is fending for himself.

thematically the film isnt particularly disimiliar to its predecessor, with antoine dealing with the familiar tomes of rejection and the seemingly impossible pursuit, for him at least, of attaining some kind of stability in his life (with regards to relationships at least). his plight with the young colette, a girl he meets at a concert hall is one of the strongest realisations of what it feels to be a young man in love that i have ever seen. the hope and the rejection are born out of genuinely universal themes, that we can all relate to. the comparison between that of antoine’s attempts at stealing a kiss from colette and the journey that a skiier makes down a treacherous hill is a particularly wonderful moment, and the final scene of antoine sat (emotionally) alone with colette’s parents captures a scenario that is all too uncomfortable, even as a viewer.