The 400 Blows (1959)

"Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I'd tell them the truth and they still wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to lie."


French New Wave cinema is something I know virtually nothing about. It is an era of cinema which took place predominantly in the 1950's and 1960's which apparantly brought about a fresh look to the world of film. The 400 Blows, a film by Francois Truffaut one of the most famous New Wave directors to come out of France, is often said to be one of the films that defines this exciting and perhaps at the time radical new genre.

The film tells the story of Antoine Doinel a boy on the verge of entering his teenage years. At his all-boys school he has been labelled the trouble-maker and his teachers often hand out overly severe punishments to him whenever they believe him to have done wrong. This is illuminated near the beginning of the film when a 'distasteful' calendar is being passed between the boys none of whom want to be caught with it in their possession. As each of the boys quickly passes it on to the next it is the unfortunate Antoine who has it in his hand as the teacher notices what is going on. As you would expect it is he, not any of the others who receives the punishment.

At home life isn't much better. His mother and stepfather don't often refer to him by name, especially when they are talking about him without his presence. His mother seems uninterested in him except when Antoine can be viewed as a means to her own end. At times Antoine seems to have a healthy relationship with his stepfather but his short temper appears to stop this from flourishing more than it does and the pair never seem fully attached to one another. Neither parent seems to know Antoine too well and instead go off reports from others when it comes to judging him which just seems fundamentally wrong when it comes to parenthood. Perhaps it is the cramped living conditions, in which the family constantly have to squeeze past one another; the living conditions that mean Antoine's mother has to step over his bed just to get in the house when she returns from her affair with another man, that have led to the family's lack of togetherness. Or perhaps it is just the affair. Either way Antoine struggles to cope with the dullness of everyday life.

Without knowing how the story unfolds you would assume that Antoine ends up in a youth detention centre because he genuinely is a bad egg. But throughout the whole film it seems obvious that really he isn't. He is more unlucky than genuinely bad. It is the attitudes of those around him who seem responsible for his 'locking up' and not Antoine himself. The calender moment has already been noted but after this we see him punished again this time for plagurism of the famous French novelist Balzac but Antoine saw this simply as a homage not a blatant attempt to plagurise his work. Antoine is a playful and creative character but whenever he displays this side it is often met with disapproved looks and comments from those seeking to control him.


But The 400 Blows most certainly is not all doom and gloom and there are actually some moments that genuinely make you smile none more so than the rather redundant yet brilliant scene where the P.E. teacher (at least that's who I assume it is) takes the class of boys on a jog which plays out like more of a work through the streets of Paris. The scene is shot from well above the rooftops of the buildings they pass but, unbeknowst to the teacher, two by two and three by three the boys dash off into shops and alleyways slowly deminishing the trail behind the oblivous 'coach.' The score is also one of the more happier delights in the film. It has a childlike quality that seems to suit the various scenes that it suppliments.

The lead role of Antoine Doinel is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud and he plays the role in exactly the right manner. Many child actors deliver performances that just do not seem to accurately reflect how children are but here Leaud captures the essence of being a growing boy quite brilliantly. Truffaut must have seen the qualities of the young man as he stuck by him for a twenty year period in which each time Truffaut hired Leaud to play Doinel ina series of films that developed Antoine's life even more.

The film's final and most famous shot, the zoom in to freeze frame of Antoine's staring face as he stands by the sea's edge really seems to capture the period of Antoine's life that he (and we as viewers) have now reached.

As soon as I had finished watching I was unsure of my opinion. In terms of great character studies I had seen before it it is Scorcese's Taxi Driver that stands out as the greatest in which Travis Bickle is a character that literally fascinated me. But the study of character evident in The 400 Blows is a bit different and on first assessment didn't fascinate me half as much as Bickle did. Antoine's character didn't really grab me as an individual but on reflection his character did grab me in terms of the whole. Antoine represents the whole of the youth of France in the 1950's and how the methods of dealing with delinquency were unfair and unjust. It wasn't until I realised this that I felt sympathetic towards Antoine and it was only then that I felt I could label this a brilliant study of character and French society as a whole.

Rating: 9/10