Nine years after the devastating non-committal freeze frame that ended “The 400 Blows”, Francois Truffaut returns to his young protagonist, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), for this romantic slapstick comedy about the craziness of love and life in your early ’20’s. With only a slight backdrop of the political unrest in France in 1968 running a current through the film, Truffaut’s Doinel is a military drop-out, dishonorably discharged from the Army and released to a future of petty jobs (hotel clerk, private investigator, shoe boy, TV repairman) and awkward romantic yearnings, in effect, the same boy we saw stealing a typewriter in 1959, only older, and more curious. And it’s obvious that Truffaut feels for the character (and Leaud, who is used much differently here than in Godard’s “Masculin Feminin” two years earlier, but that’s more about the differences in the directors at this point in their careers than anything) a certain kinship, guiding the boy through humiliation and sexual experimentation with a tender gaze that only hints at the New Wave’s penchant for ironic realism.