The 400 Blows 1959

Young Antoine Doinel looks at the camera in the final shot of the film but also he’s looking at us. He is interrogating us: what should I do? What can I do now? We do not have the answer. We have no idea. The anguish that boy’s rugged and sad vicissitudes reach their climax of impotence. What will become of me? he seems to ask. What will become of him? we ask ourselves. We have taken care of him and we have to abandon him to his uncertain luck. He has the sea in front, he has freedom and life ahead, but, like the immensity of water, freedom and life appear before the child with the paradoxical feature of a limit.

François Truffaut, in one of the most unusual and exceptional stories in the history of cinema, will continue to tell us the life of Antoine Doinel over the next twenty years - as his interpreter, Jean Pierre Léaud, grew up - in a short film and in three more films plus the short Antoine and Collette. We know about his jobs, his hobbies, his loves, his marriage, his heartbreak. Upon the director's untimely death, in 1984, forever suspended the narration of the adventures and misadventures of that boy with the soul of a child-minded adult who always did the thousand and one antics, which is what he means, in French, by the title “Les quatre cents coups”.

Antoine traverses his childhood through the emotional desert of his family and through the hostile jungle of the school. He is an unloved child. His mother became pregnant of him without wanting it. She is always nervous, resentful in the presence of an unwanted child that reminds her of her mistake, her life that went wrong. Antoine will soon discover that his father is not his real father. Neither does he want to or is interested in him. Antoine becomes a glob, a bulge that remains and annoys in the small space of the apartment and in the burdened life of his parents. He has learned to get out of the way, to disappear, to be submissive and diligent to go even more unnoticed. But always fatally commits an error that materializes his existence as something annoying to others.

At  school, and not infrequently due to chance, he is caught as the body of crime and punished unjustly, as he writes. In that authoritarian and farcical school that is so far away from educating under the republican motto of equality, freedom and fraternity that the camera shows us, with acid irony, in a short shot. Stuffed in a merchant's robe, the teacher that aspires to be in a police uniform, behaves like a prison guard. And between both prisons, the home and the school, between the emptiness of the lack of love and the weight of a blind law, the bitch of his life elapses with two small oases of freedom: the street and his inner world.

The street represents the friendship with René, the companionship, the opening to the world of dreams that the cinema represents. The cinema is Antoine's great hobby, and if one day he borders on happiness with his parents, it is the day when he is taken to the cinema. The other great hobby of Antoine is reading. The books allow him to survive in a corner of the unpleasant domestic landscape. The books and films nourish the inner universe of Antoine, expand it and enrich it, they provide a refuge from the aggression and the inclemency of the outer wastelands. The books and the movies are the real home and the real school for Antoine.

It is important to say that in spite of the scattered elements,  the four hundred blows is a film of autobiographical content. François Truffaut was also a bastard son who was slow to discover that the man who had given him his last name was not his real father. The misfortune of Antoine was the misfortune of Truffaut, delivered, first, to the care of a nurse and, later, to the successive care of his grandmothers. Bad student, expelled from several schools, Truffaut also ended up in jail and in a juvenile facility. Behind Antoine's taste for Balzac - for which he builds an altarpiece - is Truffaut's love for books, expressed in numerous quotations and tributes throughout his filmography, materialized in the adaptation of many novels, sublimated to the end in Fahrenheit 451, the film based on a story by Ray Bradbury, which showed a future cold and unlivable world in which the books were banned and burned and an endeavoring group of men and women secretly memorizing the masterpieces in order to transmit them to posterity.

The Antoine who sneaks into the cinema and who steals a poster of “Summer with Monika, by Ingmar Bergman, is not far from the François who at the age of fifteen already had founded a cinema-club and who, just a year later, wrote movie reviews thanks to the support of André Bazin, the true father figure in his life, to whom Truffaut dedicates his first film. Bazin, critic and film theorist who sponsored the The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), died of leukemia in November 1958, the month in which the shooting of The Four Hundred Blows began, without actually seeing the great harvest that resulted from his support for the enthusiastic group of young people that would change the direction of French and world cinema.

Autobiographic? The movie could be like a novel, like a poem, like a memory? Could a film be a personal testimony, a confession of one part, an intimate chronicle? Until the arrival of The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), no one had considered such a thing with a vocation and impetus for continuity. And of course not under a stylistic guidelines related to such endeavor: realist documentary , reflection of the everyday, low budget, lightness and simplicity in the staging, recourse to non-professional or unknown actors, spontaneity in the dialogues, flexibility in the follow-up of the script, rejection of non-natural sets, refusal of academic rhetoric.

Truffaut and his first-time companions gave a new twist to neo-realist postulates from Rossellini's proposal in particular-and transgress the sclerotic and old narrative of French cinema for a few years, with films like The 400 Blows, giving way to a domino effect with the help of their English contemporaries, they renew everywhere the vision of world cinema injecting it with an unknown freshness and freedom that, despite the regression suffered in the following years, still spreads everywhere.

Truffaut, gave a new light to modern cinema, tells us the life’s episodes with a distance, with a lack of emphasis, with an informative dryness and with an instantaneity that not only does not veil his touching and moving vision, but he lets them flow until we, the spectators, capture all the pain of the unfortunate Antoine Doinel, woven by the treacherous threads of chance. Young Antoine gets entangled more and more in a chain of insignificant crimes with punishment, robberies and lies that never deny his innocence and whose serious consequences worsen his position with a deep strength, forged by the previous suffering and by his condition as a survivor.

The desolate and questioning look that Antoine Doinel directs us in the final scene (freeze frame) is not pathetic because it anticipates new misfortunes, with not a few disadvantages, but also with resources, the child knows, and we know, that he will have to address, from his confusion and helplessness, the arduous task of becoming a man without love.

Cast.

Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel

Albert Rémy as Julien Doinel, Antoine's stepfather

Claire Maurier as Gilberte Doinel, Antoine's mother

Guy Decomble as Sourpuss, School teacher

Patrick Auffay as René Bigey, Antoine's best friend

Georges Flamant as Monsieur Bigey, René's father

Pierre Repp as an English teacher

Daniel Couturier as Betrand Mauricet

Luc Andrieux as Le professeur de gym

Robert Beauvais as director of the school

Yvonne Claudie as Mme Bigey

Marius Laurey as L'inspecteur Cabanel