Jean-Pierre Léaud at 75

July 4–August 30, 2019

This series surveys the career of a French New Wave icon, from his youthful roles as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel to his embodiment of a dying Louis XIV.

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  • Love on the Run

  • The Mother and the Whore

  • The 400 Blows

  • The Death of Louis XIV

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Death of Louis XIV

    • Friday, August 30 7:45 PM
    Albert Serra
    France, 2016

    Serra’s masterful film brings us inside the bedchamber of the dying King Louis XIV, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in a performance the Los Angeles Times called “a magnificent stare into the abyss.”

  • La Chinoise

    • Wednesday, August 28 7 PM
    Jean Luc Godard
    France, 1967

    Godard’s 1967 Pop-agitprop portrait of revolutionary youth, including an ardent Léaud. “Feels like a trial run for the May 1968 revolution. See it by any means necessary” (Time Out New York).

  • Irma Vep

    • Sunday, August 25 7 PM
    Olivier Assayas
    France, 1996

    Olivier Assayas casts Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung as an actress suffering through ego battles and other disasters on a French indie film shoot, with a classically irascible Léaud as director.

  • The Mother and the Whore

    • Friday, August 23 7 PM
    Jean Eustache
    France, 1973

    BAMPFA Collection

    Léaud gives perhaps his greatest performance as a castaway from the sixties and the sexual revolution, waffling between two women, in Jean Eustache’s chronicle of disenchantment in post-1968 Paris.

  • La vie de Bohème

    • Wednesday, August 21 7 PM
    Aki Kaurismäki
    France, 1992

    Kaurismäki’s update of Henri Murger’s novel is “a fine, deceptively querulous comedy that mocks the conventions of art and romantic love while . . . exalting them as the only means of salvation” (New York Times). Léaud puts in a brief but pivotal appearance.

  • Day for Night

    • Saturday, August 17 8 PM
    François Truffaut
    France, 1973

    Imported Print

    Léaud joins an ensemble cast for a behind-the-scenes romantic comedy in which the love interest is cinema itself. “Truffaut’s droll and generous celebration of filmmaking remains an enchanting experience” (New York Times).

  • Weekend

    • Friday, August 2 8:30 PM
    Jean Luc Godard
    France, 1967

    “Godard’s vision of bourgeois cataclysm. . . . A savage Swiftian satire, it traces a new Gulliver’s travels through the collapsing consumer society as a married couple set out for a weekend jaunt” (Time Out). Léaud has a revolutionary cameo.

  • Love on the Run

    • Saturday, July 27 6 PM
    François Truffaut
    France, 1979

    In 1979, Truffaut and Léaud return for a final look at Antoine Doinel, now in his thirties, but perennially adolescent.

  • Bed and Board

    • Wednesday, July 17 7 PM
    François Truffaut
    France, 1970

    In this bittersweet fourth installment in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga, Léaud’s character endures the travails of young married life.

  • The 400 Blows

    • Thursday, July 4 7 PM
    • Sunday, July 14 4:30 PM
    François Truffaut
    France, 1959

    Imported Print
    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    A fifteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud made his first appearance as François Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel in this quintessential coming-of-age film, a lyrical but unsentimental portrait of adolescence and of Paris.

  • Stolen Kisses

    • Sunday, July 7 7 PM
    François Truffaut
    France, 1968

    Léaud returns as Truffaut’s quintessential dreamer Antoine Doinel, flitting through 1968 Paris in search of love and livelihood. With short Antoine and Colette.

  • Masculine Feminine

    • Saturday, July 6 8:15 PM
    Jean-Luc Godard
    France, 1966

    Léaud stars as one of Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”—the young people of Paris in 1965, choosing between la tendresse and politics.