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Bed & Board More at IMDbPro »Domicile conjugal (original title)

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12 reviews in total

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14 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
The Second Greatest Romantic Film Ever Made!, 23 August 2000

Author: jlabine from Brooklyn, New York

"Bed And Board" is the fourth installment in the great Antoine Doinel (played by a maturing Jean-Pierre Leaud) film series, directed by Francois Truffaut. This film is really almost as perfect as it's predecessor "Stolen Kisses", and (in ways) almost a sort of remake, using the same characters and similar situations. The story begins with a newly weded Antoine, who works as a flower dyer, while his wife teaches musical lessons. Again, Antoine goes through his life trying to find his occupational and romantic nitch. His occupational endeavors consist of becomming the guy who electronically maneuvers model boats at an American corporation. His wife soon is pregnant with his baby boy, and the idealistic domestication becomes shakey, as Antoine begins an affair with a Japanese girl named Kyoko (played by Hiroko Berghauser). What is somewhat interesting, is the French purest attitude (or small town mind set) that seems to take place in the film. The owner of the American corporation is played by American actor Billy Kearns (can be seen playing Freddie Miles in "Purple Noon") and he's the stereotypical baffoon American. Japanese girlfriend Kyoko, is the quiet reserved Asian that thinks of romantic suicidal notions for Antoine and herself. Another outsider (who everyone in the Parisian village is afraid of, until he's found out to be a comedian/ impersonator and NOT a strangler) is treated with contempt until it has been established through media/ television performance spoken in French. But it seems that Antoine and Christine's happiness is being constantly pulled at, by French outsiders. But I suppose this is what Antoine would like us to think. Still the character who (accidently) lies and cheats his way through life. This is a far more cynical version of love, compared to "Stolen Kisses", yet all the more relevent in it's depiction of growing love pains.

The Antoine we see here is more emotionally lonesome than he ever was, yet he's married and has a kid. It still contains some of the greatest romantic moments in cinema history though. The scene where Antoine asks Christine to put her glasses on (one more time) is beautiful. Also the reversal situation of fetching wine from the wine celler, will put smiles on the faces of anyone who'd seen a similar scene as this in "Stolen Kisses". Though Antoine may not be as innocent as he once was in the earlier films, his Antoine is a far more realistic portrayel of men in general. This is truly another wonderful film by Truffaut, that would be as great as "Stolen Kisses" if it had retained some of the innocence. Highly recommended, one of my personal favourites!!! I give this a 13 out of 10!

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15 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Scenes from a Marriage by Truffault, 25 July 2006

Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Some time after "Baisers Volés", Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Christine Darbon (Claude Jade) are married and Antoine works dying flowers, and Christine is pregnant and gives private classes of violin. When Christine is near to have a baby, Antoine decides to find a new job, and he succeeds due to a misunderstanding of his employer. In a business meeting, he meets the Japanese Kyoko (Mademoiselle Hiroko) and they have an affair. When Christine accidentally discovers that Antoine has a lover, they separate. But later they miss each other and realize that they do love each other.

"Domicile Conjugal" is a delightful and very funny "Scenes from a Marriage" by Truffault. His ambiguous alter-ego Antoine Doinel is responsible for hilarious scenes: the dialog in English with his future boss while looking for a job; charging the mother of a student of violin; the surrealistic dialogs with the guy that borrows money from him; his unusual work of maneuvering model boats. The chemistry of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade is also amazing, with many wonderful dialogs and beautiful scenes. I particularly like their kiss in the wine cellar, which repeats "Baisers Volés", but with Christine having the attitude this time; or when he calls her "my little mother, my little sister, my little daughter" in the cab, and she replies that she would like to be his wife; or their dialog when she is wearing glasses on the bed or when he calls her in the restaurant. "Domicile Conjugal" is a simple but lovely movie. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Domicílio Conjugal" ("Conjugal Domicile")

Note: On 14 June 2009. I saw this movie again on DVD.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Antoine Doinel's good life in a funny and romantic film, 6 February 2011

Author: Rodrigo Amaro (rodrigo882008@hotmail.com) from São Paulo, Brazil

And who could imagine that Antoine Doinel, the misunderstood and agitated character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in "The 400 Blows" would succeed it in life? Now he's married with Christine (Claude Jade), has a strange work, first selling flowers, then controlling little boats by remote control, father of a pretty boy and life goes on with some up's and down's after a little romance with a Japanese girl. Doinel's story in "Domicile Conjugal" ("Bed & Board") is presented as a sweet and funny tale barely remembering the confuse boy of the film released in 1959. But there are moments when the audience is reminded of the young Antoine and his problems with his parents and problems with school (when he decides that his son will be a writer and that he won't have lessons at school, cause of many of the problems of Doniel).

Truffaut's makes his most funniest film here, a humor that is not created with absurd or a slapstick comedy but it is simply a day-by-day of Doniel's presented with charm, humor, originality in memorable moments (Doniel's strange friend who always asks money of him saying that he'll pay in double; or Doniel's breaking the wall of his apartment to make a room for his child; and some conversations between the couple about male nudity and the breasts of Christine, which according to Antoine are different to each other). It takes common and ordinary situations of everyone's lives and makes of it something beautiful, delightful and pleasant to see. And the two main actors are marvelous on screen, have a electrifying chemistry and brilliant performances.

A perfect work and a movie of the highest quality, "Bed & Board" is one of those films that you wanna watch it more than just one time. 10/10

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Uneven installment in the Doinel cycle, 20 April 2009

Author: rjyelverton from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

"Board" almost becomes a great film, but is dragged down by a regrettable, forgettable romance between Antoine and a stereotypically exotic, distant Asian temptress. Christine and Antoine are now married and "Board" will focus on the simultaneous distance and close connection that marriage can create. Antione finds himself bored with his wife sexually--"Bed and Bored"--without the challenge of pursuit, but ultimately finds himself longing the connection and comfort he shares with his lover.

While "Kisses" featured a frequently slapdash editing style, Truffaut's direction in "Board" is fluid and dynamic. It opens with a delightful sequence following Christine's feet down a city street as we are cleverly introduced to Mrs. Doinel for the first time. "Kisses" is often chaotic and oddly directed while Truffaut appears to be in full control of this installment. The camera pans and swoops with precision and grace and the editing is concise. This film features some of the most assured direction of the series.

Much of the film's action takes place in Antoine and Christine's neighborhood: a collection of apartment buildings with windows and doors emptying into a shared courtyard. It's a small, boisterous community whose characters in their boisterousness and choleric temper recall a Fellini ensemble. While in this neighborhood, the film enchants, but then we are taken outside of it and into a regrettable storyline involving another dead end job for Antoine and a boring affair.

Antoine and Christine anchor the film and keep you watching. Leaud still charms and scenes late in the film when he realizes he loves Christine deeply, though his lust may have cooled, are touching and painful. The two portions of the film inside and outside the marriage are uncomfortably incongruous, but Truffaut's assured direction and the film's ensemble ultimately redeem the uneven film.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Staircase, infantilism, fantasy…, 13 March 2011

Author: vitaky2001 from Canada

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Truffaut turns a banal story about a newly wed couple, the birth of their first child, young man's infidelity, their separation and reunion, into a fascinating study of conjugal universe. At first glance, the central characters Antoine and Christine may appear to be happy, yet, as the story unfolds one can see their difficulty of relating to one another. As is usual with Truffaut's films, Domicile Conjugal presents the viewer with a highly dense text that constitutes perhaps the director's greatest achievement in his life-long exploration of relationship between men and women.

Truffaut's central symbol in this film is staircase. The characters constantly go up and down stairs. The psychoanalytic meaning of it is clear enough and has in fact been used by Hitchcock, whose films Truffaut found inspiring. Downstairs, a lascivious neighbor tells Antoine that she is going to have him soon. Money (another key psychoanalytic symbol) is also exchanged below as Antoine reminds an oblivious mother to pay for the music lessons that Christine (a violinist) offers to her daughter. By contrast, upstairs is the space of high art (in addition to Christine, there is an opera singer living next door). It is also a space of conjugal relations, or rather an attempt at such relation. As the first strains between Antoine and Christine become apparent, Antoine brings home a portable winding stairs and makes Christine mount it when she practices her violin. Unlike Freud and Hitchcock, Truffaut never quite claims that the high and sunny floors of our personality are a mere cover-up for the dark recesses of basic instincts. Nevertheless, the constant ups and downs in Domicile conjugal suggest that marital life involves a lot of interaction between an individual's consciousness and the unconscious.

Antoine, an autobiographic central character of Truffaut's cinematic universe, is known to director's fans as a boy who never grew up. In his late twenties as in his early teens, Antoine is entirely in love with his fantasies. The film starts as he dyes a bunch of carnations red by adding a substance to the water in which the flowers stand. Eventually, his pursuit of the absolute red color (an absolute passion?) leads him to overdose and burn the flowers down. As Antoine and Christine lie in bed, he reveals his fantasy to her by reading an obscenity into a news paper column. Looking for a supposedly serious job with an American company, Antoine ends up occupying himself with piloting toy ships in a miniature haven arranged on a pond (Truffaut will use the same image later in his La femme a cote). A consummate egoist enchanted with his own inner world, Antoine embarks upon a graphomanic enterprise of writing a novel, which, in Christine's words, will be his childish revenge upon his parents (a reference to Truffaut's 400 coups, and its central theme of a parentless childhood).

The infantile nature of Antoine's character is also apparent from his reaction to the news of the birth of his son. Significantly, Antoine does not hear his colleague who tries to shout to him over a distance that he has a boy, and learns the sex of the child by looking through a binocular at a magazine picture featuring a boy and a girl that the colleague shows. Being absolutely self-centered, he tells neighbors about the news, phones someone, but forgets to bring flowers to Christine on a first post-natal visit. And then he projects his own fantasies upon the baby, envisions him as a Napoleon of the literary world, and declares that he will be his son's sole educator (which references Truffaut's fascination with the 18th century educational ideas in his L'Infant sauvage). Finally, Antoine also does not forget to name the boy Alphonse despite the fact that Christine liked a different name.

Yet, Christine is not very much different. The whole episode in which they disagree on the names for the baby simply suggests that fathers and mothers have different fantasies about their children, that men and women have different fantasies… He calls Christine his sister, daughter or mother, while she imagines herself as his woman/wife (note the opening episode, when grocer and newspaper vendor call the newly wed Christine "mademoiselle" and she insists on being called "madame"). Whereas Antoine's pillow book is about Japanese women, Christine reads about Rudolf Nuriev, a famous ballet dance who had recently defected from the Soviet Union. As she and Antoine break apart, she takes his photo with their child out of the frame and one can see Nuriev's face below.

Thus, the conjugal scenes in this film are a wonderful illustration of the idea that men and women take their fantasies with them as they go to bed. And yet, as Antoine's affair with the Japanese girl Kioyko demonstrates, pure fantasies are pure hell. Kioyko's foreignness indicates the impossibility of communication. The language is not the issue, as Kioyko speaks French. Yet, as Antoine soon discovers, it is impossible to converse with one's dream. As the screen of the French small talk disintegrates around him, Antoine finds himself alone with his pure fantasy of a woman, that is to say he finds himself alone pure and simple. For a garrulous Gaul like him, the silence of Antoine's last evening in restaurant with Kioyko proves to be a veritable torture from which he repetitively flees (upstairs!) to a telephone booth in order to TELL Christine that he loves her and kisses her tenderly. Yet, make no mistake: an ironic last episode of the film demonstrates that love between a man and a woman is a purely ritual thing that does or does not exist only for an external observer. Truffaut's bottom-line is that men and women are able to live together only when their fantasies do not clash with one another. Forever children, men and women play out their dreams together or alone. As Jacques Lacan argues (and Truffaut agrees), there can be no SEXUAL relationship…

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Domestic comedy, 14 December 2009

Author: Polaris_DiB from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Truffaut's Antoine Doinel avatar returns in a cute movie about a young man newly experiencing marital bliss. This means, of course, that arguments are to be had, babies to be birthed, and infidelity to be explored. Now of course I wouldn't mind a beautiful Japanese woman either, but I'm not married and this turn of events was rather predictable. Nevertheless, it's all romance and good cheer as Doinel slowly learns that he really does love his wife and no other, and grows more and more frustrated with the other woman who expects too much of him. At least it's not Fatal Attraction, but a strange Jan Svankmajer-like flower decomposing scene, followed by a campy reveal, makes the movie a little bit more interesting than your typical domestic drama.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I prefer the 400 Blows. Nevertheless! Francophiles will have a lot of fun watching the small urban community that satellites the action, and Truffaut's direction and cinematography is gorgeous in its own right. Just don't expect anything profound in this comedy about a moody young Frenchman feeling a little confused (haven't seen that before, aye?).

--PolarisDiB

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
An overlooked gem., 10 February 2007

Author: masterp_97

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Its funny how this movie is totally an overlooked gem seeing as how I did some research and found it was listed in the top 10 on both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's Top 10 films of 1971. Surely these guys were onto something.

Not being too familiar with Francois Truffaut's films, I saw this film playing late one night on TV and since I understand french thought I'd sit down and enjoy myself. This movie was so beautifully done I couldn't believe the lasting impact it had on me. First of all, i must say that Claude Jade is hands down one of the most attractive french women to grace the screen (Catherine Deneuve and Sophie Marceau among others). This film is the fourth of five in Truffaut's "Antoine Doinel" series (films that mirror Truffaut's life) that began with the 400 blows. Though i've not seen any of the trilogy other than Domicile Conjugal and L'Amour en fuite, Domicile Conjugal to me stands out on its own without having to see any of the others.

The film is about Antoine Doinel (played so easily by Jean-Pierre Leaud) who is now married to Christine (Jade) and they have a baby boy. Antoine makes flowers and Christine teaches violin. They are happily married and live a quiet life. One day Antoine tries out for a new position (after his absolute red formula for flowers completely bombs) as a remote control operator for a toy boat that floats in the river(???) outside the building where he works. After a few days, the man that hires Antoine is leading a tourist group of Japanese throughout the grounds when one of the group, a mademoiselle Kyoko becomes immediately attracted to Antoine doing everything to grab his attention from an escort to the washroom to purposely dropping her bracelet into the river for him to retrieve to give back to her later. And you can just imagine what transpires after..(love triangle). In the end, just like a similar couple that occupies the same apartment as them we find out that Antoine and Christine were just behaving like an old, married couple as Truffaut so intelligently and hilariously depicts during the last scene of the film. In really makes you sad to find out what happens to them in the final movie of the series.

This movie is spectacular, and is littered with small but powerful romantic scenes such as Antoine asking Christine to put her glasses on, the wine cellar scene, the telephone booth scene in the restaurant where he is talking to Christine and she wasn't responding to him because she was listening, and the so romantically beautiful "You are my mother, my sister, my lover" cab scene.

The movie is quite difficult to find on DVD. But if you happen to find it I highly recommend at least one viewing (especially if subtitles or romance movies aren't your thing). Where the romance films of today are usually so sappy and done to death and leaves you with an empty, unsatisfying feeling in your gut, this overlooked gem shines out above them all. Bravo!

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4 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
A one-man creation, 20 January 1999
Author: Michael Noel from Isle of Skye

This is the fourth and penultimate film in Truffaut's semi-autobiographical series about the life of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The movie depicts Doinel in the early years of marriage to his childhood sweetheart Christine Darbon (Claude Jade). The picture begins showing Antoine trying to scrape a living selling dyed flowers in the busy Parisian courtyard while his wife teaches violin in the apartment above. If this film was a novel you could rip half the pages out to represent the amount of storyline in the picture. But this does not take away anything from this piece of cinematic magic. Truffauts use of the camera and soundtrack is as usual the making of the film.It is obvious that this film is a one-man creation. How many filmmakers could you say that of today? The balance of characters, incidents and minute side glance at daily living restores your faith that art and craftmanship is making a tender comment on life can make a deep one too. The couple soon become parents and Antoine lands, by pure chance, an unprestigious job in a prestigious American construction company. But Domestic bliss soon tires our hero and he is tempted to the bed of a statuesque Japenese girl. The story is told with Truffauts usual wit and charm and filled with affectionate homages to filmmakers from Jean Renoir to Jaques Tati.

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5 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
The first half sparkles, but it gets lackluster by the end, 30 December 2006

Author: marissas75 from United States

In "Bed and Board," the boyish Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) settles down to married life with Christine (Claude Jade). But while it seems like a promising idea for this beloved character to move on to the next phase of his life, the film does not live up to its potential.

"Stolen Kisses," the preceding movie, was a romantic comedy with such a consistently sweet and charming tone that it became something more than mere fluff. "Bed and Board" maintains the same sparkling tone for about the first hour. Christine and Antoine's apartment building is inhabited by the quirkiest group of Parisians to come along until "Amélie," thirty years later. (Both movies even have an old man who refuses to leave his apartment.) Indeed, the movie, and its hero Antoine, are in love with quirkiness: Antoine works dyeing flowers and operating remote-controlled model boats, which are even stranger than the odd jobs he held in "Stolen Kisses." There are also some tenderly idiosyncratic scenes between the newlyweds.

But "Bed and Board" becomes much less interesting when it aims for a more serious tone and introduces infidelity into the plot: Antoine cheats on Christine with a Japanese woman, Kyoko. To add insult to injury, Kyoko is a blatant stereotype of the "exotic, submissive Asian woman," wearing kimono and writing calligraphy. Maybe Christine and Antoine were always a mismatched couple—Christine is very practical and bourgeois, while Antoine is a fanciful dreamer—but if he has to cheat on her, couldn't he do it with someone amusing?

Obviously the Antoine Doinel series dealt with some very serious themes in its first installment, "The 400 Blows." But that movie was a unique, distinctive look inside the head of a troubled 14-year-old boy; however, the serious themes of "Bed and Board" are found in innumerable French movies about infidelity. It's too bad that "Bed and Board" falls so flat in its second half, because its first half is whimsical comedy at its best.

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0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Understanding in the end., 1 August 2009

Author: Queen_of_pentacles from India

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

i loved this movie for the minute observations of different characters , social scenario of a French neighborhood , husband-wife relationship , birth of a baby , and obviously , the husband's affair , while the wife is still in the process of adjusting with her newly acquired status. Every thing ids so natural ! Taking out of the trinket from the waters . meeting the newly found acquaintance in her apartment , going out for dinners and the wife finding out about the affair ! It touches your heart the way this young couple is trying to make their living , the cute baby , the girls' parents , and the hero's witty remarks , that he loves parents , if they are not his own ! Francis , a genius film maker , has a rare quality of observing the shades of human behavior , which is truly gifted . After all the turmoil, the couple does come to terms with each other , as they really love each other , and every thing else is just a passing phase. Perfectly cast , imaginatively pictured , wittily dialogued , this is a real gem of a world classic movie.

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