Stolen Kisses is once more that special Truffaut blend of sentimentality and screwiness, of an alert eye, a spunky technique, and a respect for the zaniness of life. But this loose sequence of adventures and misadventures befalling Antoine Doinel (the child hero of The 400 Blows and youth hero of Truffaut's episode in Love at Twenty) upon his dishonorable discharge from military service … is too aimless, casual, slight. One wonders why film exhausts its major talents so quickly.

The answer is, more than anything else, quick imitation. If a writer evolves a new technique, it takes a relatively long time for it to become understood, accepted, and emulated. Film, however, displays its novelties perspicuously, palpably, immediately—there are no serious problems of translation, dissemination, interpretation, and film is mass-produced and mass-consumed everywhere. (pp. 184-85)

Truffaut's misfortune is to be so engagingly, seductively, accessibly filmic that his imitators have exhausted...