In it, Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Truffaut's autobiographical persona of The 400 Blows grown up-and he is great as he takes a variety of jobs in Paris and tries to romance with the boss' wife, a whore, and the proverbial girl-next-door. While Stolen Kisses is beautiful as a pure romantic ballad (the film unfolds within the context of the song "I Wish You Love"), Truffaut throws in enough wildly dissonant notes (the pathetic clients at the detective agency where Leaud works, the strange man who confesses love to the heroine at the end) to undermine one's hope that love can ever be as idyllic as popular songwriters and moviemakers would have it.

Z. This thriller, based on some tragic real-life events in recent Greek history, is good in so many ways, one is inclined to forgive its shortcomings.

The screenplay, by Jorge Semprum and Costa-Garvas, is taut and suspenseful. Raoul Coutard's photography cannot be faulted and is particularly adept in its use of cold steel-like colors to add to the cauchemar feeling of the film. Costa-Garvas' direction is lickety-split and sometimes brilliant (his groupings of the pacifist heroes to show simultane-ously their solidarity, strength and fear; the demonstration scenes, which accomplish effortlessly what Haskell Wexler wasted a whole film on in Medium Cool. )

What keeps Z from being the masterpiece we all hoped for is its failure to establish a psychological level for its exciting characters and situations, Z really adds nothing to our understanding of human beings who lead political lives. We deify the assassinated opposition leader because of his ideas and public poses. We admire the investigator because the story shows us he is brave under fire. The pigs look and talk like pigs, and that is that.

The few attempts to provide depth in characterization are the weakest parts of the film: a few quick flashback shots for Yves Montand, as useless as John Schlesinger's attempt to create a past for Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy; Costa-Gravas's seeming attempt to link one character's villainry with homosexuality.

Still, Z is a powerful document of our political world. And one can only marvel at the screen personalities of Montand and Irene Papas-and the acting of Jean-Louis Trintignant (who with Z, Les Biches, and Rehmer's Ma Nuit Chez Mand proves himself one of the best French actors) and Charles Denner (even more impassioned than he was in The Two of Us ).

LA FEMME INFIDELE. A beautifully shot and plotted film by Claude Chabrol, which, as we have learned to expect from this New Wave director, zeroes in on a complex human relationship. This Time around, the people involved are an upper middle-class couple and the wife's extracurricular lover.

The picture is witty (particularly in its cinematic references to Hitchcock's Psycho ), suspenseful, and edited to absolute perfection. It is cleaner filmmaking than Les Biches, and, for that reason, is probably less interesting. (Nor is the relationship of the characters as intriguing as that of the earlier film).

Stephanie Audran and Michel Bouquet contribute grand Chabrolesque performances, and, as usual, there is a murder which radically changes the characters' perceptions of themselves and each other.

IF. . . Lindsay Anderson directed this flamboyant, and sometimes sloppy, film about all the fantasies-political, sexual and mystical-that keep us going in a civilization built on dehumanizing concepts of order. As an example of this civilization, the film presents the milieu of a British public school. For us, it provides a triumverate of students who dream of bloody mass assassination and wild sexual escapades.

The film is at its best in evoking the school's atmosphere and the exuberance of the heroes' visions of revolution. If. . . is also very funny and pathetically sad on occasion. The random sloppiness involves the ambiguity of some of the images (notably, a sudden fetus) and the lack of followthrough with some of the characters (a "new boy" who dominates the film's first five minutes, a new and seemingly benevolent headmaster introduced later on).

If. . . is also one of the few British disillusionment-with-old-England films in recent years that is not heart-on-sleeve-a syndrome that applies to 1969's lamentable Oh, What a Lovely War. And in the film's ability to get us to cheer and revel in its violent dreams of destruction, it is positively startling.

PUTNEY SWOPE. Recommended for acid heads and those with good peripheral vision, this movie shares with If. . . a distrust of all systems of social order. Robert Downey, an underground ( Chafed Elbows ) filmmaker, wrote and directed Swope, which explains what happens when a group of militant blacks take over a Madison Avenue ad agency.

The film's form-it literally bursts at the seams with irrelevancies, obscenities, improvisations and chaotic editing-fits its message: if we dislike systems, we mustn't fight them but ignore them.

Putney Swope is not for people who hate Stanley Kubrick or for those who believe in common decency and/or logic; some of it is filthy, and the whole film practically disintegrates before your eyes, like Alka-Seltzer. But the commercials-within-the-movie will be cherished by all.