General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Love on the Run

Love on the Run (French: L'Amour en fuite) is a 1979 French comedy-drama directed by François Truffaut and the fifth and final film in his Antoine Doinel cycle, following the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud from childhood through divorce¹. Now in his thirties, Antoine concludes his marriage, pursues a new romance with a record-store salesgirl, and re-encounters past loves while confronting his own history¹.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	L'Amour en fuite; directed by François Truffaut, France, 1979¹
Place in the cycle	Fifth and final Antoine Doinel film, after The 400 Blows (1959), Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), and Bed and Board (1970)²
Release	France January 24, 1979; United States April 6, 1979³
Runtime and format	95 minutes, color, 1.66:1, French (other sources list 93 or 94 minutes)¹^•⁴
Key creatives	Screenplay by Truffaut, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Aurel, and Suzanne Schiffman; cinematography by Nestor Almendros; music by Georges Delerue¹
Principal cast	Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine Doinel), Marie-France Pisier (Colette), Claude Jade (Christine), Dani (Liliane), Dorothée (Sabine)¹
Reception	Rotten Tomatoes 62% from 13 reviews; IMDb 7.0 from about 8,000 ratings⁵^•⁴

Spoilers

Story and place in the Doinel cycle

Truffaut introduced Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959) and continued his story through the short film Antoine and Colette (1962, part of Love at Twenty), Stolen Kisses (1968), and Bed and Board (1970), tracing the character from loveless childhood through first love, marriage, and infidelity². Love on the Run closes the cycle: Antoine, now in his thirties, is amicably ending his marriage to Christine (Claude Jade), a violinist, while enjoying moderate success as a novelist and clinging to his romantic fantasies¹.

The plot turns on chance encounters. Antoine is involved with Sabine (Dorothée), a record-store salesgirl whom he pursues in the belief that without love one is nothing¹. He meets his first love, Colette (Marie-France Pisier), now a lawyer, when she buys a copy of his newly published autobiography, which recounts his past loves⁴. He also crosses paths with Liliane (Dani), an old flame, and with Monsieur Lucien (Julien Bertheau), the lover of his late mother, a figure who existed only peripherally in The 400 Blows; a lunch with Lucien lets Antoine posthumously reconcile with the mother he had resented².

The women in Antoine's life read his writing accurately. Colette, brandishing his second book, Les Salades de l'Amour, tells him he will not be a real writer until he writes something that is all fiction; Christine says that writing to settle old scores is not art; Liliane declares that he wants everyone to make up for his unhappy childhood². A subplot deals with the death of a child, an unusually dark element for so light a comedy⁶.

Production

Truffaut had doubts about the project from the start. On May 10, 1978 he wrote to the film scholar Annette Insdorf that he was "not terribly happy with the script," which he was to begin shooting in two weeks, and that integrating "real" flashbacks from the four previous Doinel films had produced a wishy-washy script that would be difficult to improve⁷. Pisier, who co-wrote the screenplay, later said that Truffaut hated the project very early on⁷.

Filming began at the end of May 1978 and finished by early July; the Les Films du Carrosse production took only 28 days to shoot⁷^•⁸. Because of the complicated nonlinear structure, Truffaut and editor Martine Barraqué then spent significant time in the editing room, and the film was not released until January 1979⁷^•⁸.

Commercially, the film arrived at a useful moment. Truffaut's previous film, The Green Room (1978), had been a flop, and he counted on Doinel's reappearance to pre-sell the new one. It was a hit, buttressing his company's shaky finances².

The flashback structure

Love on the Run is in large part a summing-up film. It draws extensively on clips from the previous four Doinel films, sometimes recontextualizing them and including material not in the originals, and it also incorporates footage from Truffaut's non-Doinel films Two English Girls (1971), A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972), and Day for Night (1973)²^•⁸. One flashback of Liliane and Antoine arguing is actually a clip from Day for Night, in which the two actors had also played lovers, although that film is not part of the Doinel saga⁹.

Truffaut also sliced and diced time to give different versions of the same action, such as Antoine finding a ripped-up photo of a girl in a phone booth and putting alternative spins on it². He acknowledged that he had not entirely solved the problem, as he put it, of "building a film with pieces that already exist"².

Reception and assessment

Critically, the film fared worse than commercially. It mostly received what the Turner Classic Movies essayist Jay Carr calls a critical shellacking, less for being self-referential than because Truffaut, in the eyes of many, did not create enough of a film². The New Wave Film Encyclopedia compares it to a television "clip show," with flashbacks substituting for plot substance, while noting that the public loved it¹⁰. On aggregate measures it sits mid-range: 62% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and 7.0 on IMDb⁵^•⁴.

Truffaut himself tended in later years to dismiss the film as a failure, precisely on the matter of form¹¹. He also wrote that he felt bad about handing Léaud what he called a poison pill of a role².

The film's standing is complicated by its music. Georges Delerue, Truffaut's longtime composer, won one of his three consecutive César Awards for Best Music for Love on the Run, between Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and The Last Metro¹. The title song was written and sung by the popular singer Alain Souchon, to whom Truffaut explained the many senses of "flight" he intended: time flying, love flying out the window, and the fact that however much one flees one's problems, they pursue².

Aftermath and availability

Truffaut was 46 when he filmed Love on the Run and made three more films before his death in 1984, so the film stands as his final word on his signature character²^•¹². For Léaud it marked the end of a great period that had begun with The 400 Blows in 1959 and lasted twenty years¹².

The Criterion Collection released the film on home video as Spine #188 and in The Adventures of Antoine Doinel collector's sets¹. In the United States it streams on the Criterion Channel and the France Channel on Amazon, with rental and purchase options on Amazon Video and the Apple TV Store; in the United Kingdom it has streamed on BFI Player⁴.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1970s › Released 1977 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?