Francois Truffaut’s 'The 400 Blows'

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Saw this a while back and recommend it for aspie viewing.


FILM
Francois Truffaut’s 'The 400 Blows'
By Damien Chazelle

A selection from French cinema history - a review of Francois Truffaut’s 'The 400 Blows' (1959).

In the scores of films on adolescence, there have been a handful of classics, but one stands out above all others. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) helped launch the New Wave, and thereby helped transform world cinema. It is one of those rare, timeless films that seems just as fresh with each new viewing, which is why it is such a pleasure to return to time and again.

The key to much of the film’s power is its aching simplicity. Truffaut tells the story of fourteen year-old Antoine Doinel, a Parisian enfant terrible, whose various missteps include playing hooky, lying to his teacher that his mother has died, and stealing a typewriter. However, this young schoolboy is no streetcast renegade hell bent on trouble. I’ve always found the original English-language advertising motto for the film ­ “Angel faces hell-bent for violence” ­ thoroughly absurd. There’s nothing “hell-bent” about Antoine. If anything, he comes across as a scared, but hopeful, kid, who has repeatedly been given the short end of the stick. His parents care for him, but in the clumsiest of manners; when he tries to pay homage to the great French novelist Honoré de Balzac in an essay assigned for school, his teacher interprets the move as plagiarism and suspends him; he is caught not in the act of stealing a typewriter, but returning the one he stole.

One of the dramatic peaks of the film comes when Antoine is in a police van, being driven to prison through the dark, rain-soaked streets of Paris. As Jean Constantin’s hauntingly beautiful score dips and swells, we focus on Antoine’s face, framed by the bars through which he peers. In one medium-angle shot, we can barely see a tear trickle down his cheek. Through the simplest of means, without resorting to heavy-handed melodrama, Truffaut has cast his protagonist as a noble victim, who we not only pity, but thoroughly identify with and hope for.

That said, there is much more at work in The 400 Blows than a tale of victimized youth. The film is unabashedly autobiographical, and many of the smallest details, including, for example, Antoine’s stealing of a flyer depicting a famous movie star in one scene, were lifted from Truffaut’s own Parisian childhood. Indeed, Truffaut often described his youth as filled with petty misdeeds, street-bound aimlessness, and confrontations with the law. He credited cinema for saving his life: the movies gave him something outside of his own world to love and dream about. André Bazin, France’s most prominent film critic at the time, became his mentor, almost a father-figure, and as a result it is no surprise that Truffaut would dedicate his first feature to that great cinephile. One can even spot a budding filmmaker within the framework of Antoine’s unruly character. When he plays hooky, he takes the opportunity to go to the movies; while roaming the streets of Paris at night, he continually walks by posters of stars and sirens of the screen. The New Wave was deeply influenced, especially via Bazin, by Italian neorealism (traces of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief may be seen in those movie posters that line the streets) and in the general aesthetic of Truffaut’s film: its lack of overt melodramatic devices, the simplicity of its narrative, its poetic rendering of ordinary people and the great city they inhabit.

Perhaps the single most meaningful incident in The 400 Blows is Antoine’s decision to draw inspiration from Balzac for his school paper. What he interprets as respectful homage his instructor sees as shameless lifting. This moment in the movie is structurally crucial, in that it results in Antoine’s decision to abandon school (and his household) for good, but it also seems to function on a deeper, more self-referential level. Truffaut, as with many of the New Wave filmmakers, was first and foremost a lover of cinema, and this love is translated into his picture through allusion and borrowing from other movies. The wonderfully funny scene in which a gym teacher leads his class through the streets of the city, and one by one they disperse behind him, is quite overtly inspired by Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite. When Antoine’s family decides to go to the movies, they see a real film directed by one of France’s most prominent directors at the time - Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient. As previously mentioned, the influence of The Bicycle Thief and other neorealist pictures also permeates the movie throughout. Whether in an essay or in a film, there’s always a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, between homage and plain stealing ­ and Truffaut clearly recognizes this. Antoine’s trouble with Balzac and his teacher is thus a modernist device, through which Truffaut comments on his own practice in making the film.

More importantly, perhaps, is the referencing itself ­ the fact that The 400 Blows is littered with moments and ideas that are obviously inspired by other films. This was one of the first movies ever made that was about movies while ostensibly being about something totally different. In that sense, it helped forge the path for a new school of filmmaking, out of which sprang other New Wave landmarks, including Breathless, the classics of the “film school generation” of American directors, such as Mean Streets, Chinatown, and The Godfather, as well as, more recently, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. Granted, Truffaut was not the first director to self-consciously reference other movies within his own, but to do what he did within the bounds of a gentle and heartbreaking coming-of-age story was a great, audacious, and fundamentally unprecedented move. For all its simplicity and lack of pretension, it’s safe to say that The 400 Blows revolutionized world cinema. It is both one of the most poignant and one of the most important movies ever made.