• Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)

9/3/21 (Fri)

Truffaut’s fantastic 1959 film about a boy effectively pushed into delinquency was his first full-length feature but already feels like the work of a master. It is not a story so much as a slice-of-life sequence of events that follow events in the adolescent’s life. The curious title comes from a French idiom, faire les quatre cents coups, that apparently means “to raise hell”. The film was reportedly released initially as “Wild Oats”, which fits the meaning better, but the title soon reverted to the direct translation, where it has remained since. Still, the English title does work in its own way even devoid of context as a symbol of the seemingly endless vicissitudes that the boy is subject to, the blows being psychological as well as physical. And it sounds better than “The 400 Vicissitudes”.

The setting, established in a lovely sweeping opening, is Paris. The teenaged Antoine, who lives in a converted closet in his parents’ cramped apartment, is a playfully naughty kid on par for his age, but his rotten luck is to get caught. A dirty picture being passed around in class, neatly tracked by the camera in a single shot, is in Antoine’s hands when the teacher spots it. It is Antoine who gets punished, making things worse when he writes his apology on the wall. With little encouragement at home from an egocentric mother and indifferent father, he plays hooky from school, claiming that his mother died. The parents are apoplectic to learn about this from a tattletale classmate (though the narcissistic mother wonders only why the son picked her to die rather then the father) and come to the school to apologize to the enraged teacher. They scream at the child and slap him in front of his classmates. He runs away from home, helped by his best friend, but is caught in a store after hours with a stolen typewriter (which he is in fact trying to return). He is thrown into a cage in prison and sent eventually to a correctional facility for delinquents. His friend tries to visit but is not allowed, and his mother comes only to tell him that his father is tired of him and plans to send him to a labor center. During a game of soccer, he manages to slip away, crawl under a fence and run off. He reaches the ocean, and as he gazes out at the waters, which he has always longed to see, he turns directly to the camera, the frame freezing on his face as if begging us not to look away.

It is frustrating to watch Antoine fall through the cracks absent any guidance from his dysfunctional parents or the strict disciplinarians at both school and the facility. Not that he’s an angel – he did steal the typewriter, a nice pen and his father’s Michelin Guide, and admits pilfering money from his grandmother, noting that she is old and doesn’t need it. And the family is not all bad: when Antoine accidentally burns part of the house after lighting a candle in a makeshift shrine for his beloved Balzac, the family ends up laughing it off and spending a joyous night together at the movies.

But the more we learn, the more we empathize with the boy. The school only wants its students to follow the rules, showing no tolerance for individual quirks. He is forced by his teacher to recite poems word-for-word, but his paraphrasing of his hero Balzac is rejected as mere plagiarism. Meanwhile, his mother is cold and interested in little but herself, their interaction consisting mainly of her complaining or barking orders at him, other than a brief interval of sweetness after she suspects he saw her making out with a guy on the streets. His father swings between friendly and apathetic, concerned only with the races that he attends most nights. (That’s reflected as well in another student’s inability in the English lesson to say the phrase, “Where is the father?”) Antoine overhears his parents arguing about him in unflattering terms, making him feel a burden to them. We can hardly blame him for running away given the little he has to lose. In an astonishing scene where Antoine is being interviewed by an off-screen psychologist, he reveals dispassionately that he is the unwanted son of an unknown father, saved from abortion only by the intervention of his grandmother, and that the man calling himself the father married his pregnant mom to help her out. He says that he lies because no one believes the truth anyway. He is truly, through no fault of his own, a lost soul with nowhere to turn. The film leaves little hope that the next page of his life will be any more promising.

Truffaut’s camerawork is nothing short of amazing, from the sweeping shots of Paris to the kid’s claustrophobic living space to the scene in the dark factory. Particularly memorable sequences are the literally dizzying scene on a carnival spinning machine, where the floating Antoine truly has no direction; the awe-struck children dreamily enjoying a puppet show as Antoine and his friend plan their next caper; the overhead shot of the PE teacher running in the streets with his students, who gradually slip off until he’s left with almost no one; the heartbreaking scene when Antoine is looking through the bars of a police wagon out onto the Paris lights as he is taken to the facility; the interview mentioned above, superbly acted by Antoine; and the escape at the end, including the famous last moment. In none of these breathtaking moments is the director simply showing off. All are in perfect synch with the material, complementing the story and carrying it forward. The detached storytelling renders no judgment and thus avoids being preachy or moralistic. That makes it all the more moving.

Jean-Pierre Léaud dominates with such an assured performance that it’s impossible to imagine the film without him. He was apparently one of several dozen who auditioned for the part, but his presence is so overpowering that the entire movie feels like it was made for him. The film is reportedly a semi-autobiographical piece reflecting Truffaut’s own upbringing, but I doubt even Truffaut himself (who was only 24 at the time) could have carried this off so confidently. One of the best kid performances I’ve ever seen.

Claire Maurier is perfect in the self-centered mother role, and Antoine’s best friend also does a fantastic job. But the acting is flawless all around, a tribute as well to the director. This is supposedly, along with Godard’s Breathless, the work that kicked off the French New Wave, but it has not aged a bit. A great film by any measure.