Occupied Territories

Slapstick is a mode of thought in Godard, another way of exploring possibility; in Truffaut, it’s more like a structural principle and a closed system of limited alternatives, both comic and bleak. This is reflected in its own yin and yang duos. Laurel and Hardy might be Truffaut’s favorites: they turn up in Halloween-type children’s masks in Stolen Kisses (69), and even when Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) dubs his wife’s breasts, which he declares aren’t the same size, Laurel and Hardy in Bed and Board (70). Doubles abound in Truffaut, but as matched sets, not in the usually dynamic form of doppelgängers.

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Richard Combs, “François Truffaut: Day Into Night” Film Comment (2011)

Also: “The way James Monaco interprets Truffaut’s pairings (in his contribution to Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary) is in line with a view of Truffaut’s expansive humanism: ‘these bifurcated personalities offer Truffaut a chance to investigate the dynamics of human relationships, their micropolitics.’”