Antoine Doinel (Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses)

Created by François Truffaut & Marcel Moussy

Shy, hapless and hopelessly romantic bookworm ANTOINE DOINEL is hardly your typical private eye. He tumbles in and out of love in a series of five romcoms by noted French director François Truffaut that follow him as he stumbles his way from rebellious teenager to manhood.

He wanders through a variety of occupations throughout the five films, everything from working in a factory manufacturing vinyl records to TV repairman, but it’s their third entry, Baisers volés (1968) in which he becomes an actual private eye.

For a while…

Antoine is a piece of work, an almost-Chaplinesque figure who’s part scamp, part slacker, and full-time dreamer, his head perpetually in the clouds and his heart permanently on his sleeve.

In the screwballish Baisers volés (the English title is “Stolen Kisses), the third in the series, it’s 1968, and Doinel has just been booted out of the French army, caught shirking his duties, reading novels and writing letters to his would-be girlfriend, violinist Christine (whom he met in the previous entry in the series). Problem is, she doesn’t really see Doinel as her boyfriend.

With nowhere to go and Christine temporarily out of town, Doinel wanders through the streets of Paris, looking for work. Christine’s parents (who seem to like him more than she does) help him land a job as a night clerk at a hotel, where a private detective convinces him to take him to the room a woman has recently checked into. Turns out she’s in the sack with another man.

Quel surprise!

The detective trashes the room, but it’s Doinel who’s blamed, and he’s once more out of work. Fortunately, the detective takes pity on him, and gets him a gig at the Blady Detective Agency where he works. Mostly Doinel is tasked with following suspected adulterers, although he does go undercover — at a shoe store.

Again, with disastrous results. Turns out Doinel’s’s about as good at being a private detective as he is at any of the other jobs he takes during the course of the film — or his mostly unsuccessful relationships with women.

But during his brief foray as a bona fide dick, it sure is fun watching him try.