Mischievious Miracle

And so began the French New Wave as we came to know it. With The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coup), François Truffaut jumpstarted the newly formed French New Wave, a filmmaking style of intense personal films that remained stylistically different. Though the New Wave had been around for two years after Roger Vadim made And God Created Women, the future of the film movement was in The 400 Blows.

Like fellow New Wavers Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut was a film critic before he ever picked up a camera, writing for the highly influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (the film is dedicated to Andre Bazin, the man that secured Truffaut a position at the magazine). Having the insight into the critical side of film viewing, Truffaut set out to make a feature film. After short films Une Visite and The Mischief Makers, he brought out The 400 Blows, a story of a boy whose life came close to Truffaut's.

Antoine Doinel (Léaud) is a young Parisian just trying to survive in a world that seems against him. Whenever he is part of some foolery in school with other children, he is the one that is caught -- then, upon punishment, he spirals into more and more trouble. His home life is not one to sing the praises of. His father abandoned him, leaving him to be adopted by his mother's next beau (Rémy), only to catch his mother (Maurier) in the arms of another man. She does not really love Antoine, as he learns from his grandmother, who stopped his mother from getting an abortion.

He constantly finds himself in trouble, finally getting him so low that he cannot be saved by his conniving. His juvenile delinquency places him in trouble with the law, finding himself locked up in a jail cell with thieves and prostitutes. Antoine is sent to another world in a juvenile detention center, where he finds a whole different place for him to become free from.

The film features countless moments that have become the icons for the French New Wave. The troubled youth that is seen in every image of Antoine followed into everything from the Godard Pierrot le Fou to Truffaut's Jules and Jim. The shot of Antoine sitting in a two-by-two jail cell with his turtleneck over half of his face and the final image of the film were the moments in cinema history that the New Wave was created for. Film is not here only to entertain, but to provoke. These two moments say it all.

There are so many underlying meanings to this film. Not only does Truffaut attempt to see youth and misunderstanding, but also the confines of life and loss of innocence. Truffaut made this of his own youth. He too was a delinquent and a poor student, the child of a less-than-perfect mother and an adoptive father. The only thing that stopped him from continuing in this life was the world of cinema. He was so taken in by films that sitting in a theatre took him away from the world he was living, if only for a few hours.

There are a handful of moments in which Truffaut lets the audience see exactly what the cinema does for his characters. In one of the most beautifully photographed moments in cinema history, he shows a group of small children watching a puppet show, their fear and joy is so moving that it takes not only Antoine and friend Rene away, but also the audience of The 400 Blows.

Also, one of the few truly happy moments in the Doinel household happens when they go to the cinema. Sure, the trip is the aftermath of Antoine nearly setting fire to the apartment by making a candle-lit shrine to Balzac. The only reason they go is because Antoine's mother knows that Antoine saw her with another man and hopes that her peace offering might help him to keep her secret.

Every scene of this film is through the eyes of Antoine, with the exception of a sequence in the classroom after Antoine is sent to get some cleaning materials for a letter he wrote on the wall. For that reason, the audience knows only what Antoine knows. We are voyeurs in his family quarrels, not watching the parents fight, but seeing the pain of the listening Antoine.

Truffaut chose unknown Jean-Pierre Léaud after an extensive search and would work with the young actor many more times. The most productive of their work together was on the story of Antoine Doinel, which would be seen in a short film (Antoine et Colette as part of the Love at Twenty anthology) and three more features (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run).

The performance from Léaud is one of the greatest from any young actor. He was only 15 when he made The 400 Blows, but seemed to have captured the needed feeling for the character. Léaud, the son of a then well-known French actress, was, himself, another delinquent in the vein of Antoine -- he skipped school to get to the audition.

Rating: A+ / **** out of 4

The 400 Blows

(Dir: François Truffaut, Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Patrick Auffray, Guy Decomble, Georges Flamant, Calude Mansard, Jacques Monod, Robert Beauvais, and Pierre Repp)