Title: The 400 Blows
Rating: 4 Stars
So, I’m now at the pandemic isolation stage of watching clusters of semi-related foreign films. I’ve just wrapped up watching some Kurosawa films. I’m now apparently into French films from the 1950s. I’m guessing that needlepoint will be next.
First of all, The 400 Blows is a hilariously mistranslated title of the film. Sure, that’s the literal translation of the French film title (Les quatre cents coups). What is completely lost is that that phrase is actually a French colloquialism to raise hell. If you’re expecting someone to be punched in the face 400 times or, I don’t know, to blow up 400 balloons, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. In fact, even the movie poster seems to be purposefully misleading. There’s a clenched fist thrusting out as if there will be 400 blows and the tag line is “Angel Faces hell-bent for violence”. I’m not sure if skipping school, plagiarizing Balzac, and stealing a typewriter are all gateways to murderous mayhem, but what do I know?
Antoine Doinel is a young boy in Paris. He consistently gets into trouble in school. He does such dastardly things as pass around a magazine and writing on the school walls.
He and his parents live in a tiny apartment. It’s clear that they don’t have a lot of money. His father seems pretty nice enough, if a little weak. His mother seems to have it in for him, regularly criticizing him for seemingly minor infractions.
One day he sleeps in and will be late for school. Wanting to avoid getting in trouble, he and his best friend Rene decide to skip the entire day. The next day, when his teacher asks for his excuse, Antoine claims that his mother has died. It turns out that that excuse is not exactly bulletproof. His parents come down in a rage and pull him out of class. Here we start to first hear talk of sending him off to a reform school or a military school.
His mom offers him money if he wins an essay contest. Instead of writing his own essay, he plagiarizes from a Balzac novel (and yes, as all malcontents tend to do, he legitimately worships Balzac to the point of having a shrine to him that he lights a candle for). Again, this is not exactly a foolproof plan and he gets caught. Antoine decides to run away from home. He needs cash to set out, so he decides to steal and then pawn a typewriter from his father’s office. Unfortunately, typewriters can be easily traced so no pawnbroker will pawn it. Antoine tries to return the typewriter but gets caught. This is the last straw for Antoine’s parents. They turn him over to the police. The police send him off to a treatment / reform school for troubled teenage boys.
There we hear some of Antoine’s background. It turns out that his father is not his father. His mother got pregnant and then married a man that was willing to give the child his name. His mom resents Antoine because she never was able to have the career that she wanted. There are often conversations, overheard by Antoine, between his mom and her husband about how their life would be better without Antoine. They often leave him alone at home. In fact, they once went off one Christmas without him. Antoine feels alone and alienated in what should be his home.
While playing soccer with the other students, Antoine manages to steal away. He runs and runs. He finally ends up at a seashore for the first time in his life. What will Antoine’s life be after this? It’s left to the viewer to imagine.
I enjoyed watching the film. If you’re watching the film in 2020 with no knowledge of its place in cinema, you’ll be pleasantly entertained by it. Films like this become more interesting when you understand how significant it is to those films that follow it.
François Truffaut, the director of the film, started off as a film critic. He really despised French cinema of its time, finding it hidebound and ponderous. He was so loud and proud in his criticism that essentially he was told to put up or shut up.
The 400 Blows is Truffaut showing France (and the world) the future of cinema. To his credit, everyone was actually pretty amazed by it. It won several awards at the Cannes Film Festival.
What was so great about it? First, it put the director in control. Historically, directors were pretty much just executors. The producers (and this was true in Hollywood as well) were the ones that actually controlled the film industry. Truffaut started the idea of the director as auteur. The director chooses the actors, can change the script, set the scenery, and influence the cinematography. The director drives the final film product. A decade or so later, this caused a revolution in Hollywood when directors like Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas, inspired by Truffaut, were able to put their own stamps on their films.
The 400 Blows did several things that seemed new. The final scene of the film is a freeze frame on Antoine. This is done everywhere now (speaking of influences on American cinema, think of the final shot in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver), but The 400 Blows is one of the first instances of it. Scenes took place on live streets (as opposed to a controlled lot). Lighting was much more naturalistic. Cameras were no longer fixed. They were handheld and could move throughout the scene in all dimensions. The dialog was much more natural. Improvisation was encouraged. In fact, the most significant part of the film is the therapist’s interview of Antoine as he describes his home situation. This was taken directly from the young actor’s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) screen test where he was improvising from Truffaut’s prompts.
The end result is that you end up with a film that really doesn’t feel like a cinematic experience. It feels like you’re just watching a young man and his struggles in a series of unvarnished moments.
This doesn’t seem revolutionary now. Any number of coming of age or character studies that come out of the independent cinema today will have this look and feel. It’s interesting to be able to go back into history and to watch the film that was the patient zero for so many films today.
dorkenstein 