Movie Review – The 400 Blows

The 400 Blows (1959)
Written by François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy
Directed by François Truffaut

You’ll hear this annoying thing from hack directors who get justifiably reamed in the reviews for lousy work. They’ll say that people who are critics are just incapable of making their own art. It’s silly to say that because it tries to say that a thoughtful critique of a piece of art is invalid unless it praises that piece of art. François Truffaut loved movies since he was a child; as a young adult, he secured a job at Cahiers du Cinéma, becoming known as one of their most brutal writers. He earned the nickname “The Gravedigger of Cinema” and was the only Cahiers writer not invited to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. After seeing Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Truffaut doubled down on his dreams of making his own feature film. This led to The 400 Blows (alongside Goddard’s Breathless) and the birth of the French New Wave. It seems like critics can make great art, too.

The film concerns a sad chapter in the life of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a French schoolboy growing up in Paris. His parents often seem more annoyed to have him around than anything else. School is a series of brutalities for simply expressing his personality. Eventually, he just stops going, running around the city with a friend. He swipes money from his mom’s purse, they buy candy & go to the movies. The growing sense that Antoine is veering wildly off the tracks overwhelms the film, yet no adult provides any compassion or empathy to help him. It’s shouting and physical violence. By the time we reach the film’s third act, we know this won’t end as a happy tale, but it’s not hopeless either.

I’ve mentioned how I taught in the States for fourteen years. My focus was on primary/elementary education; for most of those years, I taught third graders (8-9 year olds). I loved my job. Let me correct that: I loved teaching children and seeing where their thoughts took them, how they learned, and how they processed information. I hated the administrative side of things, the paperwork, the glad-handing, the politicking of it. Somehow, despite never attempting, I won Teacher of the Year at my school for the 2018-19 school year, voted on by my colleagues. 

I have never understood how a teacher or any adult can become so furiously angry with the child and not the parent, the admin, the school board, or the society that refuses to provide the child with what they need. I say I don’t understand, but I do in a way. America is a society where people are taught to punch down when faced with problems caused by our institutions. The principal is taught to not trust their teachers, and the teachers become frustrated and take it out on the kids. Meanwhile, the kids’ parents are beaten down in their jobs and come home to unleash that anger on their progeny. Why anyone thinks this would lead to a better future is beyond me.

Antoine Doinel is not a child who is willing to let the system break him. He will never bend to the adults around him, so by the film’s end, he’s effectively discarded and handed over to the state, which takes all the broken children. Not that most Western institutions ever intended to help these kids, either. Oh yes, there will be individuals not yet jaded and burned out by the system who try to make a difference. Sometimes, they can, but more often than not, the lack of funding & general design of the organization is such that no actual progress can be made. These institutions exist to ensure a permanent underclass, broken people who will always be at the bottom to do the labor those who are comfortable refuse to touch,

The 400 Blows gets across the struggle of being a child. I rarely encounter a society or home where children are not seen to some degree as their parents’ property. It’s a default setting encouraged by many religions and ideologies like capitalism. The child is a lump of clay for you to shape and turn into a person the rest of society can benefit from. This mindset ignores the inherent autonomy of the child as a human being. Over the last year, I’ve come to terms with the fact that one reason my parents began to dislike me was that it was clear I wouldn’t grow up to hate the same people they did. Parents often see their children as potential continuations of themselves rather than new humans who will develop in their own way and become their own people. But that was how the parents were treated as children, so many see that as “the way things are supposed to be.”

The 400 Blows would not work as well made by anyone other than Truffaut. He lived a life very much like Antoine’s. He was born to a Parisian woman, but his father remained a mystery for most of his life. After hiring a private detective in 1968, Truffaut believed they found the man, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne, but it was never conclusive. Truffaut got his surname from his adoptive father, just as Antoine’s only father figure is his stepfather. However, Truffaut lived with his parents when he was eight after the death of his beloved grandmother, being passed around between relatives. He lived the longest with his grandmother, whom he claimed instilled a love of reading and stories in him.

As a youth, Truffaut tried to stay out of his parents’ home as much as possible, and this period of youthful rebellion is shown on screen in The 400 Blows. He was expelled from multiple schools until, at 14, the future director became self-taught. Among his goals were to watch three movies per day and read three books per week. He would often sneak into the cinema as he didn’t have the money to buy the tickets. This voracious consumption of film was a type of study that evolved out of a need to escape. When we see him labeled as a brute when it comes to critiquing his contemporaries, it is not from a place of jealousy but from the heart of a person who was genuinely devoted to the art form. Truffaut called out bad movies because he was so passionately in love with film. 

Because The 400 Blows is a plotless film, we can sink into the world and the character. It’s a pseudo-documentary attempting to depict life as honestly as possible for young people growing up in a brutal world. This also means there is zero sentimentality about what happens to Antoine. Truffaut isn’t unfeeling towards his protagonist, but he respects the character enough not to be emotionally manipulative about his life. He presents things matter-of-factly, and only in brief moments does the picture make a concerted effort to beautify a moment. I recall the scenes where Antonine is in the back of a police van, getting his last look at Paris at night, winding through the streets, and seeing the city lit up. The music, the editing, and the visual composition can communicate melancholy, a recognition by the character that in being taken away, he is losing access to something so bright & beautiful.

Child actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, whom Truffaut would bring back several times to play Antoine in other films as he grew up, is exceptionally good because of how authentic he feels. Contemporary American fare that features children has got to be some of the most hollow shit I’ve ever seen. The bleed-through of Disney Channel/Nickelodeon style over exaggerated acting has made most child performers in that industry never feel like actual kids. I suppose we could go back to the days of Vaudeville and find children being made to grotesquely overreact to appease their parents and some likely perverted manager or head of casting. There’s a tremendous beauty to a child being allowed to play an actual child on screen. The vulnerability, the pain, the moments of genuinely unbridled joy. It reminds the adults who may have lost that, they can see how pure it is.

There’s a beautiful documentary moment where Truffaut films a group of little kids watching a Punch and Judy show. The utter happiness in these kids is lovely. They laugh until they cry. They are jumping when scary moments happen. They spend some time looking around at each other, smiling, with an unspoken understanding of this moment of magic they are collectively experiencing. Truffaut is communicating something about the performing arts and their importance in bringing life into people’s hearts. What is essential is not just the show but that they are all here together to watch it. It would not feel the same if it was one child alone in the theater.