Year: 1959
Director: Francois Truffaut
After a bit of a hiatus I’ve dropped down the list a bit to the last one in the self-imposed limit of the top 50 in the Sight and Sound 2022 poll. I can’t believe in the previous decades this nouvelle vague classic was not much higher, and can only think that it’s critical fashion rather than anything intrinsic to the film that has caused it to lie in fiftieth place. A huge gap in my film education about to be filled as I’ve never seen it.
Francois Truffaut’s full feature debut, this plays almost like a first novel, in which ‘write about what you know’ rules. The episodic adventures and descent of Antoine closely parallel (we’re told) Truffaut’s own life. Far more interesting to me on first viewing is its clear role in the youthquake that was shaking up western culture as the wartime babies became teenagers. Antoine is a magnificent addition to the role call of angry young men (and they were almost all men) that were pushing aside their elders, sick and tired of the rigid society of the immediate post-war era. He’s been compared to Holden Caulfield, to James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause (who was 24 when it was made) and I’d also put him as younger and the less cool younger brother to Michel in A Bout De Souffle.
Antoine’s rebellion is very definitely of the ‘what have you got’ variety. In the early part of the scene his efforts to fit in at school are constantly undermined by his tendency to play the fool: drawing on a pin-up calendar and writing on the classroom wall. There’s a magnificent collection of teachers who offer only discipline, rote learning and sarcasm.
At home Antoine is seen as a nuisance by his mother and stepfather, the former wrapped up in an affair witnessed by chance by Antoine, the latter with work and a variety of hobbies. Their cramped flat, in which no-one will really show love or take time for anyone else, gives you a vivid sense of the immediate post-war in which there was little money for modernisation or repair and cities were full of derelict buildings (Paris of course famously not bombed by either side).
Just like Cleo from 9 to 5, Paris is one of the real stars of the film. Truffaut’s limber and restless camera follows Antoine through the streets of Montmartre, initially from school and back, but through a deserted city of warehouses and factories by night.
A pivotal moment in the film comes in the unlikely form of a Balzac essay. Antoine’s love of Balzac has already alienated his parents, as a candle he lights to his hero inadvertently starts a fire. Despite reading and learning by heart Balzac, an essay he writes is marked down for plagiarism. From this point Antoine loses faith in the promises of the adult world: that hard work will be rewarded, that mistakes will be forgiven, and that punishment will be fairly administered.
His descent takes a horrible predictable form: playing truant, staying with friends, and finally succumbing to hare-brained schemes of petty theft that land him in jail and borstal. His parents make half-hearted attempts to intervene, but ultimately leave his fate to the state. His final escape during a brilliantly lethargic football match takes him to the famous final scene: he’s seen the sea, but has nowhere left to run.
Unlike Rebel there’s no sharing and learning, no growing up to be a bit older and wiser, no adults to forgive and embrace. The agencies of the state regard him just as much of a problem as his parents. The brilliance of this film lies in its complete lack of sentimentality. Teachers are unfair and quick to anger, policemen sticklers for form-filling, and judges firm believers that a quick spell in borstal will do the trick.
The acting is again a world away from Hollywood. Antoine, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, is a magnetic screen presence. At one open and vulnerable (as in his short-lived career as a typewriter thief), and also a closed book to many of the adults who engage with him. Best supporting coat must go to his ultra-cool check jacket that accompanies him for almost the entire film.
What makes this film work so well? The combination of casting, script and Truffaut’s kinetic camerawork – instantly rendering the static studio set-ups of Hollywood look artificial and dated. The scene where Antoine and Rene visit a circus and Antoine enters a sideshow called a rotor is breath-taking. An enormous walled wooden disc rotates with participants standing at the walls. The floor withdraws once the rotating speed is sufficient for centrifugal force to pin the riders to the walls in mid-air. It’s a perfect visual expression of Antoine’s situation: in mid-air and pinned, able to wriggle about, even turn himself upside down, but with nowhere to go.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Rebel Without A Cause, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back In Anger, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Au Bout Du Souffle etc.
There are of course scenes in cinemas, reminding me of my dad’s tales of going through the exits to cinemas in Southend and seeing the second halves of films, followed by the news and a b-movie before the first half came around again. Shame that the film poster does not do his magnificent check coat justice.
What always amazes me is that the “amateur” critics of French cinema magazines basically said to Hollywood” – “move over, we can do better!” And they did, inventing new ways of filming, etc. As has been said before, this version of Cinema arrived and changed film a bit like Punk Rock did to music.
You’re quite right @Kjwilly. They certainly did do better.
But through their writing, they also revolutionised how the audience thought about the director’s role. and the art of film-making.
Truffaut’s book about his interview with Hitchcock is still considered to be one if the greatest films about cinema.
“In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: ‘Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance.’ In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, you love Rear Window because you know nothing about Greenwich Village. To this absurd statement, I replied, ‘Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.’
The wiki page is well worth a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchcock/Truffaut
Reviewing the revised edition in The New York Times Book Review, Phillip Lopate wrote that “One is ravished by the density of insights into cinematic questions…Truffaut performed a tour de force of tact in getting this ordinarily guarded man to open up as he had never done before (and never would again)…
Mosely, you and I are really on the same page. Earlier today, I popped into one of the my favourite chazzas at Odenplan in search of some groovy vintage rock T shirts for the summer.
Instead I left with some DVDs
Les 400 coups – Truffaut
The Leopard – Visconti
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg – Jaques Demy
Au Revoir, Les Enfants – Louis Malle
And a 4 DVD Boxset – Alan Bennett at the BBC.
A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of seeing Les Parapluies for the first time in a real cinema and i was bowled over. So I just had to have the DVD
Talking of seeing classics on a big screen, our film club here in Kärrtorp ended our spring season with Wong Ka-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Another film I’d never seen which really ought to be seen on a big screen. The plot that could be written on the back of a cigarette packet, yet it utterly bedazzles the viewer with its sensuality.
Bedazzzled? Now there’s DVD I’d like to find in a Swedish chazza. I suspect that would be devilishly difficult.
One of my favourite scenes from Bedazzled, the backing singers/dancers are The Breakaways. A great song.
Completely agree @noisecandy. It’s brilliant.
And it’s even better seen in the context of the film and Dud’s song just before ir.
I hadn’t realised that the Singing in the Rain Hitmaker Stanley Donen was the director. A major Hollywood name! And Raquel Welch as Lust. No expense spared!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061391/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2_tt_8_nm_0_q_bedazzled
“They’re very fickle, your pop fans.”
Bedazzled contains one of my all-time favorite lines from anywhere. Dud says to Pete “You’re a nutcase” and Pete replies, “That’s what they said about Jesus and Galileo” to which Dud counters, “They said it about a lot of nutcases too.”
Au Revoir, Les Enfants – stupendous film! One of my all time faves. Best ever childrens’ performance on film? Certainly a contender.
Great review of a wonderful film. When my other half and I first saw this not so long ago we were left speechless and then we couldn’t shut up about it for days afterwards. The interview scene in the borstal is so simple yet so powerful and the finest bit of acting I think I’ve ever seen. A perfect film.
A wonderful film that had sequels – same director, same actor, same character.
I certainly remember seeing ‘Bed and Board’ (1970) on a satellite channel about fifteen years ago and thinking it was superb.
I had to check. There were four sequels:
“Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows is a defining film of the French New Wave movement, and has four sequels, Antoine et Colette, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run, made between 1958 and 1979.”
https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cinema/the-400-blows/
The Antoine Doinel films have also been adapted into a stage play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Doinel
We watched all the sequels after loving 400 Blows so much. Apart from what they have in common (which as you mention is a lot!) they’re tonally completely different. Basically fairly lightweight rom coms. And taken as that, French period rom coms, they’re very enjoyable but they don’t feel like a genuine extension of Antoine’s story as it’s presented in the original.
I’m not that tempted by the sequels having read a bit online, and the ending is so utterly perfect to the film itself I don’t want Antoine’s future as I might have imagined it to be crystallised into something else.
Quiz in this week’s paper, How has the French expressions”Faire les quatre cents coups”, meaning “to live a wild life” been mistranslated at the movies since 1959?
Which was timely.
That quiz sounds excellent, @hubert rawlinson. I’ve never realised that the title is based, as you say, on a well-known, French expression.
Your comment led me to this discussion:
https://moviechat.org/tt0053198/Les-quatre-cents-coups/58c706ec4e1cf308b937ed23/Why-400-Blows
I liked this comment:
“Many expressions can’t be translated literally between French and English, but the French expression faire les quatre cents coups is one that makes virtually no sense at all – you can’t even guess as to what it means figuratively. I think it’s partly the definite article les (“the”) that makes it so difficult, as if there are 400 specific tricks that one must do in order to claim that you’ve lived a truly wild life.
“Also, the word coup has numerous meanings; in faire les quatre cents coups, it’s in the sense of un mauvais coup – “a dirty or mean trick.” The title of the French film Les Quatre Cents Coups, by François Truffaut, was poorly translated as “The 400 Blows” in English. “400 Tricks” would have been a little better, but I think the best translation would be something more figurative like “Raising Hell” or “The Wild One.”
On IMDB there’s the possibility to see all the different names that were used for a film when it was released internationally. Sometimes I pull my hair out about the really awful Swedish names a film can be given.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053198/releaseinfo/?ref_=tt_dt_aka#akas
Interestingly, here the Danes (Ung Flygt) and Norwegians (På vei mot livet) seemed to go against the majority and went for a title that translated the meaning of the expression.
In 1959, I suspect that an award-winning, French drama was not putting too many Scandinavian (or indeed British) bums on seats.
Then again, there was little on the TV in the late 50s and many young people would got to the flicks to get out of the house, to keep warm or if they got lucky to have a snog.
Thanks for posting this. I see it is available to subscribers to BFI. As a subscriber I shall be watching it soon.