Amorous Anthology

Love at Twenty. It happens to almost everyone. To Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) it happens at a concert for young people. Just across the aisle he sees a lovely young thing (Marie-France Pisier) with big dark eyes and a flood of thick dark hair. When the concert is over he tries to follow her home, but the subway swallows her up. At the next concert she smiles absently in his direction--Antoine reels with bliss. At the next she actually speaks to him--Antoine has found his Cleopatre. Colette, on the other hand, has merely found a nice polite boy who works in a phonograph-record factory and likes to talk about music, small for his age of course and a bit slow growing up but all the same good company for a girl who never had a little brother.

Love is blind: he cannot see her indifference. He dashes off a burning billet-doux. But she seems to miss the point. "Your letter," she cheerfully replies, "was well phrased." He rents a room that looks right into hers, makes friends with her family, pops over for dinner daily. But the closer he comes the more distant she be comes. One night at the cinema, overstimulated by Les Nouvelles de Fox Movietone, he manfully attempts to smooch. She brushes him away like a mosquito.

Next day, when she drops by his room, she finds him stripped to his shorts, lipped to a cigarette, flipped with ambition to play Jean-Paul Belmondo in a big bedroom scene. "See here," he mutters Breathlessly, "I'm sick of your cold shoulder. It's ruining my health." She hides a smile and drifts out the door before he can lay a hot little hand on her. "Dinner's ready," she sings over her shoulder. "I'm not coming!" he yells back in a fury.

But he comes. For the entree he eats humble pie. And for dessert he eats crow. A tall, muscular, handsome young man arrives, greets him as the boy he obviously is, walks out with the girl on his arm. "Antoine," the girl's mother asks him gently, "shall we watch television?" In silence the boy turns his chair to face the music.

There are five episodes in Love. The one from Italy is directed by Renzo (son of Roberto) Rossellini, the one from Germany by Marcel (son of Max) Ophuls, the one from Japan by Novelist Shintaro ("The Japanese Franc,01s Sagan") Ishihara, the one from Poland by Andrzej (Ashes and Diamonds) Wajda. Wajda's work is keen and sardonic, but the episode from France, directed by Franc,ois (Jules and Jim) Truffaut, makes the other three look sick sick sick. It is cruel, touching, funny. It is true to life at an age when life is true to art. It is Gallic Salinger, the case history of a growing pain.

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