Film: The 400 Blows

Director: Francois Truffaut
Genre: Drama
Source: France (1959)
Rating: Unrated
Location/Format: Hulu Plus
Grade: A

My shame as a cinephile is that I've never had that much interest in exploring the French New Wave, but The 400 Blows has single-handedly shown me the error of my ways. Following the trials and tribulations of young Antoine Doinel, the film surpassed my expectations at pretty much every turn. From the opening shots of the Eiffel tower, to the final (and famous) freeze frame of Antoine's face, Truffaut has created a masterpiece that is bursting with feeling--feelings of nostalgia, of sadness, of youthful enthusiasm, of discovery. The film manages to be both a warm-hearted coming-of-age film as well as a tragic exploration of adolescent abandonment.

A lot of the credit has to go to young Jean-Pierre Leaud, who embodies Antoine with a simple authenticity that never feels like acting. His face is haunting long before the closing shot, and Antoine comes to represent for me that youth who shouldn't be forgotten but is. He has parents, but not good ones--at the very least they are so wrapped up in their own dramas that they only see his misbehavior. He has teachers, but they only see his errors. He has friends, but they've got their own responsibilities. And so the series of events he finds himself in are both entirely of his own making and not wholly his fault. His fate is a failure of society, which is what makes his final run for freedom so heart-breaking.

Truffaut highlights this with repeated shots and images of Antoine being constricted--he is placed behind dividers as a punishment in school, he is left in a tiny bedroom, he is placed in a tiny jail cell. The walls seem to close in on him, and though he briefly and occasionally finds freedom in the streets of Paris, again and again he is limited both physically and (we fear) emotionally as well.

There are brief respites. It is telling (and I am not the first to suggest) that one of the ways Antoine finds an escape is through the movies themselves, as he travels with his parents one evening to get away. It is one of the last "good days" it seems, and other smarter film scholars than I have written about the scene's significance. But that's what I like about the film. Each little vignette seems to have a lot to say about the way Truffaut views the world. There is creativity and life in the film that are invigorating.

I'm not sure where to go next as I explore the French New Wave, but I'm no longer intimidated by doing so. And I immediately added this film to my syllabus this semester for the high school Intro to Film Studies class I teach. I'm excited to keep researching it, and I'm interested to see what my students think about it. I hope they will love it as much as I do.