Where Baisers Volés was essentially a celebration of capriciousness—of ephemeral relationships between unique but emphatically temporary beings repeatedly sidetracked by life's infinite chances—Bed and Board …, the last of Truffaut's films in the Antoine Doinel cycle, is ultimately an apology for staying in the same place. Which may perhaps explain its air of rather laboured humour and intermittently forced charm….

In the long run, people are shown to be not so much uniquely interesting as equally limited…. The sad thing is that, along with the character he has nursed and created, Truffaut too seems to be running out of energetic improvisation and to have discovered the meaning of boredom.

On one level, Domicile Conjugal [Bed and Board] is an elaboration of the anecdote from the opening sequence of Tirez sur le Pianiste, of the man who fell in love with his wife two years after he...