Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is a film that divides cinematic history into the time before and after its release. Sure, the realist aesthetic Truffaut employs had been seen before in the works of great directors like Roberto Rossellini, yet the young director’s first feature arrived as a conscious mission statement of where filmmaking would go. Truffaut was famously one of the excitable and ferocious critics of the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, which essentially created modern movie criticism with its formation of the auteur theory, positioning directors as the authors of filmmaking.
While honoring his favorite filmmakers like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock in the magazine, Truffaut derided the French cinema he saw as dishonest and out of date. Given an opportunity to show what he believed French filmmaking should be, he created this classic coming-of-age tale of disadvantaged youth. The result was instantly hailed a masterpiece at its Cannes Film Festival premiere and ushered in the French New Wave that saw Truffaut and his Cahiers du Cinema buddies redefine the medium. Like all movies this influential, The 400 Blows no longer plays like a radical text after decades of imitation and influence. However, the painfully honest emotions and observations on display have lost none of their power and the film remains timeless, standing as a personal triumph even within the storied director’s long and successful career.
Truffaut’s loosely autobiographical tale follows Jean-Pierre Leaud’s 12-year-old troublemaker Antoine Doinel. He isn’t a thug, merely a lost young boy disrespected, misunderstood, and ignored by every authority figure in his life, prone to acting out as a means of defining his own existence. Doinel lives in a tiny apartment with his bored and embarrassed-by-poverty mother (Claire Maurier) and his easy-going stepfather (Albert Remy), who treats the boy more as an acquaintance and annoyance than a son. The parents are too wrapped up in their own issues to focus on their child beyond chastising him for perceived misbehavior and any trouble they hear about from school. Doinel’s teacher (Guy Decomble) typecasts him as a brat without motive and that, along with bad luck, sees him blamed for everything that goes wrong in class.
The boy finds his few pleasures in attending films, wandering the streets with his friends, and occasionally committing petty crimes. When he’s arrested for ineptly stealing a typewriter, Doinel’s parents give up despite putting little effort into raising the child. They allow him to be arrested and put in a cell with criminals and prostitutes, before shipping him off to a hopeless boarding school for troubled teens. Doinel soon escapes, but with nowhere to go he wanders by a beach, where a final devastating freeze-frame catches his face in a moment of existential crisis, happy to have the past we’ve witnessed behind but with no sense of where to go.
From the lyrical opening credits circling through the streets of Paris towards the Eiffel Tower to that haunting final frame, Truffaut’s gorgeous cinemascope black-and-white images flow into each other effortlessly. The movie is filled with moments of visual splendour that never draw attention to themselves or become a style-over-substance means-to-an-end, like so many lesser New Wave features. Truffaut would present more jittery stylistic floushishes in his later classics Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim, yet here his focus is elegant simplicity.
Truffaut’s wide frames are not a collection of telegraphed images but open frames that characters can wander in and out of naturally without worry of hitting specific marks. The aesthetic allows realism to dominate tone and form. It’s a movie that appears to be comprised more of captured moments like a documentary than a rigidly scripted story. That truthful feel Truffaut achieves is one of the major reasons why the film has aged so well. While specific moments and settings may date the project, Doinel’s ignored and confused young existence is universal, perfectly capturing a feeling of childhood repression and misunderstanding everyone has known as least briefly.
Truffaut was still an angry young man when he wrote and directed The 400 Blows at 27. His anger at authority and rejection of previous generations would fade over time, yet capture a certain feeling that all men of a certain young age experience. In the teenage Jean-Pierre Leaud, Truffaut found an almost impossibly perfect collaborator. His naturalistic performance style was honed well beyond his years, and elements of his own personality slipped into the character of Antoine Doinel to make his creation a full collaboration. Doinel is something of the ultimate misunderstood teen (like a less irritating Holden Caulfield) and the character proved to be so immediately identifiable and iconic that the pair refused to let him go.
They would return to Doinel’s life four more times: in the “first love” short Antoine and Collette (1962); the joyous comedic ode to love during one’s meandering 20s, Stolen Kisses (1968); the awkward young marriage tale Bed and Board (1970), and the wistful, nostalgic flashback-clip reel Love On the Run (1979). It’s a unique collaboration in film that follows a single character through 20 years of his life, even if all of the projects pale in comparison to The 400 Blows (although Stolen Kisses is quietly one of the director’s best). Truffaut and Leaud may have created an indelible character worthy of a lifetime of exploration, but no period of his loosely fictionalized life was as emotionally resonant and relatable as the youngster’s troubled youth. But then, to be fair, few films are as emotionally resonant or relatable as The 400 Blows.
The film was an overnight success for Truffaut that turned him into one of the world’s most important filmmakers, a title he maintained until his life ended far too soon at 52. Like all of his New Wave compatriots, he never quite matched the success of his debut trio of masterpieces. The inventive and relentless Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962) seemed to suck up all of the dreams of stylistic experimentation he’d built up over a life of watching films, while the three movies (especially The 400 Blows) seemed to succinctly encapsulate everything he had to say as an artist.
He still piled together some extraordinary films repeating his themes both in and out of the Doinel cycle, yet it says a lot that his best work after the ’60s was Day For Night, a loveletter to the filmmaking process. Still, most directors are lucky to make one films as equally personal and universal as The 400 Blows. The fact that he even had two other ground-breaking movies to immediately follow alone makes him one of cinema’s greats. The 400 Blows is a film to be cherished and adored, something that captures the imagination of any lost soul of a similar age to Doinel along with anyone who remembers that fraught time in their own life.
The 400 Blows is screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Monday July 23 at 8:20 pm as part of the Summer In France program featuring over 40 classic French features.
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Phil Brown writes about film for Toronto Standard.
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