François Truffaut's The 400 Blows marked a turning point in French cinema. Up until 1959, French film was rigidly traditional—more novel-like with screenplay stories formally crafted and resolved. The 400 Blows was the first French film to neatly break from this model. It incorporated the director's perspective rather than adhere to a tidy, formulaic storyline. Best of all, Truffaut left space in the film for the viewer's imagination to fill in the blanks. Handheld cameras were used to blend actors into actual street scenes, and Truffaut shot with the new French Dyaliscope anamorphic system, allowing for wide-angle cinematography. The result was a new sense of authenticity and journalistic immediacy. The camera's devotion to movement and speed gave the film urgency, and the film's restlessness and documentary realism ushered in the French New Wave.
The 400 Blows follows the hard Parisian life of Antoine Doinel (above), a confident if unfeeling 12-year-old whose serial lies in school and at home lead to petty thievery, adult disgust and physical abuse. Eventually, his life of poverty and reckless disregard for discipline land him in hot water. The film remains a poetic study of a wild child slipping slowly through the cracks, leaving him somewhat baffled by his predicament and the ensuing fuss. All of the adult figures in the film are self-absorbed or exasperated with the new generation of post-war youth as they struggle to make ends meet. As Antoine's life unspools, you feel as if you're witnessing a child drift slowly downstream toward a waterfall without an adult bothering to pull him out.
Through Truffaut's direction and screenwriting skills, not everything is clear. Cliches are abandoned as Truffaut explores real-life dilemmas. For example, Antoine's decline isn't a plunge. There are moments of hope as he returns a stolen typewriter rather than tossing it off a bridge or when he calmly and rationally explains to the police why he made bad choices. The film's final scene is poignant, so I won't give it away. I'll only say that Truffaut brilliantly captures Antoine's wonderment and excitement when he comes face to face with something he innately understands—nature's wild energy. It's as if his character for the first time looks in a mirror or meets a twin brother.
The 400 Blows' title is meaningless. It's an English-language interpretation of Les Quatre Cents Coups. But the original title was an adaptation of the French expression, "Faire les quatre cents coups," meaning "to live a wild life." At the time, all of the English-translation ideas were flat or not quite right. Then someone suggested The 400 Blows, which clicked for Truffaut. [Photo above of Claire Maurier, who plays Antoine's mother in The 400 Blows]
The movie was Truffaut's (above) first film and the start of a series of five films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Antoine at different stages in life. Watch carefully for Jeanne Moreau, at 38:42, as a woman looking for her dog, and for the director himself, who appears in the gravity-defying fun ride in a pea coat at 22:32.
Here is François Truffaut's masterpiece, The 400 Blows. The print's resolution is great, so expand the film to full screen...
