Blown Away

“The 400 Blows,” an idiomatic expression from the French, means “raising hell,” so Roger Ebert says. CineBooks says the expression refers to the farthest point of what anybody could possibly bear.

Francois Truffaut’s first feature, Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), gives us Antoine Doinel at age 12, and you haven’t seen anyone like him. Doinel is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, and his embodiment of the character is so complete, he will haunt you long after the movie has ended. I have seen DiCaprio, O’Neal, Osment, and Paquin, but for the sincerity and the heartbreak, they do not touch Leaud.

Antoine’s mother and stepfather (Albert Remy) pass judgment on him based on surfaces and what other people say.

The teacher (Guy Decombie), for starters, paints him as trouble. One time, Antoine gets caught with a pinup calendar in his hands.

When assigned to write an essay, he pays homage to Balzac with paraphrasing so close, he can only be a plagiarist.

He skips school and to be excused, he claims his mother (Claire Maurier) has died. Guess who turns up to school the next day, and who gets branded a liar.

The mother herself has an affair, and Truffaut shows how hard it is for a child to deal with discovering it by chance. It is painful enough to learn what she is carrying on, but to have to hide it, and to finally get her attention just because she would like you to not speak about it, it is even more painful for Antoine to bear.

When you are only a child and neglected by those you hold dear, is rebellion not a logical reaction?

With a friend, Antoine steals a typewriter. He gets caught, and is detained in a police station. He runs away from home and ends up in a center for juvenile delinquents.

These are events that will make him the person he will be.

Without being sentimental, The 400 Blows manages to be a perceptive study of adolescence.

Four more films of the same actor playing the same character would follow to span 20years. Truffaut himself will go on to make Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (61), and Day for Night (73).

The 400 Blows is the youth movie against which all other youth movies must be measured, and the more you know about the history of the cinema, the more you appreciate how good it is. Some of the techniques Truffaut has employed have become standard by now, but if you place yourself in the world of cinema, this is by 1959 really revolutionary stuff.

For one, they filmed on location, as opposed to productions bound in the studio, which Truffaut had attacked in his 1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.”

For another, here is the final freeze frame to which subsequent movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Thelma and Louise and Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban owe their own final freeze frames.

As he reaches the beach, you have to wonder, Is this liberation for him? Can he even go back?

Between land and the sea, where does he go?

Without a definitive conclusion, Truffaut and Leaud tell us there are no easy answers, and they invite us to think about the uncertainties in life.