Truffaut's "Bed and Board" (Domicile conjugal)

(contains spoilers)  This 1970 film is a sequel to "The 400 Blows" about the character Antoine Doinel and played by the actor Jean Pierre Leaud who is by this time all grown up.   In this episode, now shot in color, he is married to a music tutor played by Claude Jade.  He started out as a florist's assistant and we see him in the courtyard of their apartment block dyeing carnations red and other things.  It is a light-hearted look at French urban life, with characters such as the mysterious man whom everyone thought was a murderer until they manage to see him on TV.  Then there is the old man who leans out the window and talks to his neighbors, etc.   For some reason whenever Antoine and his wife go somewhere he tosses her coat down the stairwell and someone is always coming up the stairwell and helps his wife on with her coat. 

   Later they have a child and while his wife wants to name him something aristocratic, Antoine wins out with the apparently more pedestrian name "Alphonse". 

Then he gets another, presumbly better job, is hired by an American who plans to build a harbor.  You see them working together with a scale model of the harbor complete with wireless driven shipping going in and out.  A delegation of Japanese on business visit them and Antoine is smitten by a young Japanese woman and she with him.  They start seeing each other.     He goes to her apartment.  He makes excuses to his wife that he is working late, etc.  At one point the Japanese lady sends him a bouquet of tulips in which she has enclosed little love messages.

  He receives this at work, is embarrassed by this and ditches the flowers in the trash on his way home, but a little boy helpfully retrieves them and brings them upstairs, knocks on the door and his wife receives them and puts them in a vase.  Meanwhile his wife notices that while she is interested in Rudolf Nureyev, her husband has an interest in all things Japanese.  

Inevitably the flowers begin to wilt, dropping the messages.  Thus his wife and he have a big argument. 

pissed

He continues seeing the Japanese lady but clearly cultural differences are starting to grate on him.  Finally he is out to dinner with her and more than once he calls his wife in the pay phone up the stairs and describes how annoying he finds the his new Japanese girlfriend.  When the last of these phone calls ends, he returns to the dinner table to find his companion gone with the note in Japanese which is in effect the words "Drop Dead".  So he reconciles with his wife and they get on with their lives. 

And so what do I think?  It is as I said, a light-hearted comedy of a film.  The ease with which sexual liaisons are formed and broken seems rather French or should I say so like Truffaut.  

Americans I think would not take infidelity so lightly, or at least they have not in the recent historic past.  The current President of France is shacking up with a woman not his wife and the result?  Certainly not  political suicide or resignation on his part.   Indeed he's done it twice, once before he was even elected President of France.  Compare this to the fate of presidential candidates Gary Hart or John Edwards and any number of American politicians and you see the difference.  

Anyway it is an entertaining sequel if not quite up to the power of the original.  Sequels seldom are.