Love on the Run

Love on the Run (L'Amour en fuite, 1979) is François Truffaut's final chapter in the Antoine Doinel cycle — stream it online on iFILM. Jean-Pierre Léaud has played Doinel since he was fourteen in The 400 Blows; here he's past thirty, working as a proofreader and navigating a life cluttered with women he has loved and failed to keep.

Antoine has just signed what the film presents as France's first consensual divorce. He has a new girlfriend, Sabine — a record shop clerk. Then Colette, a girl from his youth played by Marie-France Pisier, buys his thinly-veiled autobiographical novel and looks him up. Truffaut weaves in footage from the earlier films in the series, so the past literally intrudes on the present.

Truffaut made this as a deliberate farewell — two decades of Antoine Doinel compressed into 94 gentle, melancholy minutes. It rewards viewers who've followed the cycle; as a standalone it's thinner, but as a coda it's quietly moving. Watch Love on the Run (1979) online on iFILM.