“Je est un autre”: François Truffaut, Antoine Doinel, and the Fiction of Autobiography.

This article analyzes François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel film cycle, focusing especially on the final installment, *Love on the Run* (1979), and its themes of creative exhaustion, autobiographical fiction, and character immaturity. It explores how Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel, portrayed by Jean-Pierre Léaud, remains emotionally stagnant and self-centered throughout the series, with *Love on the Run* employing extensive flashbacks and a self-reflexive narrative structure known as mise-en-abyme. The article also highlights a feminist critique emerging in the last film, where female characters gain greater agency and challenge Antoine’s behavior, contrasting with earlier portrayals marked by sexism and objectification. Additionally, it situates the cycle within broader cultural and cinematic contexts, including surrealism, childhood as a site of imagination, and Truffaut’s updating of his autobiographical story to postwar Paris. The Criterion Collection’s box set of the cycle is noted as a valuable resource for cinephiles and researchers. [Extracted from the article]