The 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut

(Contains spoilers)   I know, I know.  I'm a little late with my review.  The film came out in 1959 after all and the auteur director, Francois Truffaut has only been dead for 30 years.  However I would still recommend the film.  The life or non-life of the director, writer, etc should have nothing to do with our desire to see or to read an artist.    The great thing about the advent of VHS and DVD's is the ease with which people nowadays can benefit from what was once ephemeral.  Once the feature film had departed the local Orpheum, all you had was the mental picture of the motion picture.   Now if you own or rent a copy of the film you can see it once, twice, a dozen times with or without screen commentary.  And you can watch films not just in one popcorn fumed visit to the local cinema, but like a book, shutting it off and bookmarking it until you are good and ready to experience the rest of it. 

And I visited Paris for the first (and quite possibly the last time) in April.  In the afterglow of that grand but transient adventure in seeing first hand this city and this culture,  I have renewed an interest in French culture and history.

The film opens in some dreary French school in Paris  where a classroom of boys are made to recite their lessons under the supervision of an ill-tempered male instructor known as Sourpuss.  The oppressive nature of this kind of education is clearly too much for the young hero of the story and he is driven to cut school and find inexpensive amusements on the streets with accomplices in petty crime. 

The streets are the only places where he feels free, going to the movies, or to an amusement park, and this fact is underlined with the fleeting and joyous music heard during these scenes.  At home he is similarly oppressed by his parents, who fight, and especially his mother who in time reveals herself as a manipulative sociopath of a woman. 

On one of his extracurricular jaunts he sees her in the arms of another man, and the lies of having to "work late" are revealed.  For a time this gives him a little bit of leverage with her, but only for a time.  

As the film progresses, he resorts to increasingly desperate measures to escape school and to fund his jaunts outside.  However as a juvenile delinquent he is singularly incompetent at everything he does or tries.  Asked to write an essay on a personal experience, for example, he plagiarizes instead something he had read in Balzac, a writer whom he reveres and to whom he even created a small shrine in his bedroom.  He even graces it with a candle, which sets his room on fire.   The minor incident of fire in the bedroom was not the end of it however, as he submits as his own work the experience described in Balzac, blissfully unaware that his French teacher might be familiar with it.  So he is given an F for plagiarism.    Later he steals a typewriter and tries unsuccessfully to sell it, ending up being caught when trying to return it, when perhaps the more sensible thing would have been to ditch it somewhere.  And so he gets caught, is arrested, and his parents, his stepfather and mother are through with him, and give him up to the authorities and the tender mercies of the reformatory.  

 The reformatory seems hardly  much of a change, naturally from the confinement and regimentation he experiences at school.  He finally informs on his mother's infidelity in a letter to his father and as result he finds himself completely cut off from any residual concern or care about him.  

Meanwhile he explains to the psychologist on his intake interview his view of life at school and with his parents, which is unsentimental and damning.   In the final scenes of the movie we see him escaping from the reformatory and running in an extended scene until he reaches a beach.  One can guess what happens after that, and this is where Truffaut chooses to leave the story in a freeze frame of his blank expression there on the beach.  

The film was one of the first salvos of the revolution in French cinema called New Wave, which was a movement away from elaborate artifice and towards a more personal and idiosyncratic kind of film-making.

Truffaut in 1965

The 400 Blows was confessional and autobiographical to an extent that you realize that Truffaut himself had a troubled childhood and adolescence not unlike the protagonist, and it was only when he stumbled onto film criticism and ultimately film making that his life turned around.  This was when he met Andre Bazin, the film critic who, ironically, died shortly before Truffaut was to make the film that made him as a film-maker, the 400 Blows. 

Truffaut of course went on to make many other films, the one that I remember best was "Fahrenheit 451"

which translated Ray Bradbury's dystopian story of a world where books were outlawed, and where firemen were tasked with seeking out these illegal books and readers and destroying them.  It was his only English language film.  He was a great admirer of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles among others.  The only other film of Truffaut's I have seen,  I am motivated to see more of them.  

It is regrettable that at the age of 52, in 1983 he died from a brain tumor.  With an artist such as Truffaut it is easy to reflect on what might have been, had he lived another 20 years.