French cinema at its best
Author: maax48 from United Kingdom
12 February 2006
Truffaut has worked wonders here, creating a masterful tale of a boy confused, troubled, and unloved. Antoine Doinel (played superbly by Jean-Pierre Léaud in the lead role) has strict, unfaithful parents, and a harsh, oppressive teacher, and falls into delinquency because of his unhappiness. He lies, steals, skips school and runs away from home, and soon ends up in a juvenile delinquency centre.
Truffaut's inspiration for this film came from his own depressed childhood, so he bases Antoine on himself, including in terms of appearance. Being a 'New Wave' (a cinematographic movement of the sixties, involving directors who believed Hollywood films were too lavish and unreal) director, Truffaut always used a real location for the film, including breathtaking shots of Truffaut's native Paris. He also made a cameo in the film in the style of Hitchcock.
Delinquance is the key theme here. Antoine, who is a character who believes in liberty and freedom, and the way he is always locked up is repressive for him, and this provokes a constant need for him to be out.Trying to make a realistic and moving film was Truffaut's aim, which, by watching this film, I realised that he had done amazingly well. Also, by combining humour and drama too, we have the defining French film of the 20th century. A black and white film that is full of colour. Bien sur, François Truffaut.
The Four Hundred Blows is the semi-autobiographical story of Antoine Doinel, a boy trapped in a life of contemtptuous authority who turns to outward rebellion. Truffaut shows his mastery of the cinema in this, his freshman attempt.
The film is perfectly cast with Dionel relaying neutral facial expressions for the majority of the film. The boy, although not necessarily evoking sympathy from the audience, definitely evokes empathy. He is a pathetic character forced into his position by his teacher and his almost uncaring mother.
Throughout the film, Truffaut hints at the possibility of a happy life for the protagonist, but just as soon as the ideal is given to us, it is taken away. The mood shifts in the film are fabulously orchestrated through contrasting scenes, music, and even acting. From the opening sequence through the final, enigmatic still shot, the movie is a masterpiece of both French and world cinema. It is a must see.
Author: jdnmevans from United States
12 June 2007
In viewing François Truffaut's The 400 Blows for perhaps the fifth time, I finally began to realize its true greatness. Inspired by the director's childhood, The 400 Blows (Truffaut's first film) is primarily about a young boy growing up with his mother and stepfather in Paris and apparently heading into a life of crime. Most adults see the boy as a troublemaker, but in the film, he is meant to be the protagonist.
Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is the boy's name. He is resourceful, quiet, and does what he can to get by. At home, he has a struggling relationship with his parents, especially his mother. She is a woman of curious interests, always distracted by her incommodious son and a secret affair with a man from her job. Antoine's stepfather appears nice enough while treating his son as an equal in a good manner, although he is not really attached to him. However, both parents share common traits: they are away from home quite a bit and do not pay close enough attention to their son. Sadly enough, they only judge him by his behavior and by reports they get from other people.
At school, Antoine's teacher classifies him as a menacing troublemaker. Not that it is entirely Antoine's fault, he just has terrible luck. In the opening scene of the film, we see a poster with a half-naked woman on the front being passed around quietly by the students. The teacher is sitting at his desk with his head down, grading papers, until the poster comes to Antoine and he finds it. He sends Antoine to the corner of the room, where he writes a note of resentment on the wall. As punishment for that, he is to diagram the exact words that he wrote.
At home that night, Antoine's homework is interrupted. Because he did not complete it, his good friend René convinces him to skip school the next day, although Antoine is reluctant at first. They walk around France and notice Antoine's mother kissing a man that is not her husband. She and her son make eye contact, but René assures his friend that everything will be alright. The next morning, as the boys return to school, Antoine lies to his teacher and says the reason he missed school was that his mother died. Everything is alright until his mother, furious, arrives at school and her son is immediately identified as a liar.
And yet, we see Antoine alone at home in some private, subtle, and hopeful moments. One of them being, his love for Balzac. He adores him, and we see him reading his biography and lighting a candle in a shrine in his honor at home. One day, at school, the students are proposed to write an essay on an important event in their life, and Antoine chooses the topic of his grandfather's death, in which he incorporates a phrase from his Balzac book. Alas, the teacher identifies this as plagiarism, and sends Antoine out of the classroom, along with René. The two boys stay at René's house for quite some time, living up to the expectations of a life of crime, until they steal a typewriter leaving Antoine caught trying to return it. He is later sent to a juvenile delinquent detention home.
The 400 Blows is not meant to be a tragedy. Rather, it is a character study following Antoine Doinel's life and decisions he makes as a direct result of the many things going on in it. Even The 400 Blows captures a few moments of happiness joy. One of these is a priceless sequence in which a gym teacher is leading Antoine's class for a jog through Paris, not realizing that the boys are peeling off and running away two by two. There is another scene after Antoine's shrine for Balzac catches on fire and his parents are stressing and yelling at him. His mother suggests an outing to a movie theater, where they end up going. After the film, we see the trio in the car, laughing and reflecting on what they had seen. We see this as a moment of hope for Antoine and his family, for this being the only time they are all happy together.
There are many poignant moments however, emerging late in the film after Antoine is caught for stealing the typewriter. His father is fed up with his behavior and escorts him to a police station where he is sent to a jail cell and later in a police wagon full of prostitutes and thieves, with his face peering through the bars, full of tears. His parents discuss with the authorities that they cannot not take him back because they believe he will only run away again. So, in turn, their son is taken to the juvenile delinquent school. These sequences express a reality of Antoine's life, in tune with the outcome of himself. He remains quiet and reserved towards the end of the film, as if he has nothing to say.
The story of Antoine Doinel and his many experiences allow a life to be filled with curiosity and exploration. Every second of the ninety-nine minutes of the film is not wasted. Truffaut allows every minute to be overflowing with creativity while still maintaining the central story of the protagonist. It is not a film that can be taken lightly as a family movie to be watched every Saturday night. It is a film to be given plenty of thought, carefully examined, and given a conclusion. The genius of the film does not rely on that, moreover, it relies on how much is put into the film. Down to the smallest detail, the film is able to maneuver and progress. The story contains elements of sadness, regret, family, warmth, happiness, humor, values, and choices. Just like life itself.
Author: ppw3o6r from United States
25 April 2006
This film is one of the greatest I have ever seen. It depicts some events in the life of Antoine Doinel, a young French boy who gets into a lot of trouble no matter what he does. This was the first film by Francois Truffaut, and I believe that it is filmed with such an innocence that you can really feel some of the emotions that Antoine feels. I love the simple style of this film, and I think it adds to its charm. The story is can even be painful to watch as one sees all of the things that happen to Antoine. I think that the reason for the strong emotions embedded in this film is that it is semi-autobiographical. I think the cinema is what rescued Truffaut from a life like his protagonist.In short, an inspiration to all filmmakers-they DEFINITELY don't make them like this anymore!
Author: raaesquire from United States
29 October 2006
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The 400 Blows is a film that every teenager must see. When I was 14 (Antonie's age in the film I suppose), I hated everything. I hated school, I hated living with my parents, and I didn't want to be subordinate to society on the whole. To put it simply, I wanted to just get out there and live my life instead of being picked on by school teachers and essentially be an outcast amongst my peers, who were spoiled rich white males thinking with their you know whats instead of their brains.
Antonie Doinel is a character who used his mind and what did he get? He was sent to reform school. He possesses the traits of every average adolescent male. He wants to expand his mind (he reads Balzac), doesn't do his work, riles up the teacher, doesn't really get along with his parents (although his father seems to have more vested interest in the boy), defaces classroom walls, and looks at and defaces pinups. Quite simply, his character is one of the most complex to ever be created.
In short, The 400 Blows is about an unwanted teenaged boy who submits to the world of petty crime when the rest of the world has turned his back on him. There's an interesting line that Antoine's father says to him at the beginning of the film. The boy is running back from the grocery store with flour for his mother and he runs into his dad coming home from work. "Always running son, eh?" And that's what we see for the full 99 minutes of The 400 Blows.
Sure, Antoine is actually running (especially at the emotional climax) but he's psychologically running away from the very people holding him back from breaking out in the world, be it his parents, the authorities, and so forth. There is so much other things that we see that cannot be fit into this review. Antoine and his friend Rene skip school one day and go around town. Antoine goes into a gravitron, which is an amusement park ride that spins around in circles. And that's what his life is doing: he may enjoy the ride for the time being, but he's ending up where he started from.
The film is not without humor, though. One cannot help but laugh when Antoine tells his teacher after skipping class that his mother died. "Personal preference obviously," his father says in response to the mother venting about such news. Also, Antoine's letter to his parents explaining why he ran away sounds like an adult wrote it, but there is some humor to it.
"We'll discuss all that's happened" it says. Even Antoine getting expelled from school after plagiarizing Balzac is pretty humorous and he decides not to go home and live with Rene. They end up stealing little things such as posters, clocks, and they go to the movies. However, when he pinches a typewriter from his father's office, that's the end of his little rebellion. He is sent to a correctional facility (and this is an emotional scene, as the boy is placed in a police wagon and cries as he takes a look of the streets of Paris at night).
Perhaps the most emotional scenes take place in the final portion of the film. Antoine is placed under psychiatric evaluation, where he reveals he was born out of wedlock and his mother wanted an abortion (this is hinted at in the beginning when he runs in on a conversation between two old ladies talking about forceps and a Cesarean section...perhaps they were indeed talking about an abortion procedure. Antoine feels uncomfortable around this conversation and we can see it). He can't see Rene when he visits, and his mother tells him he's on his own (although I wished Antoine would've told her "I hate you").
After briefly listening to a young delinquent who was caught trying to escape, Antoine decides to do so and bolts during a soccer game. We just see Antoine running, and running, and running. There's no music at first until he gets to the ocean. Truffaut pulls the cameras back and we see an endless horizon, endless opportunities for our young protagonist. The musical score plays and this is where I continue to get misty eyed with every viewing.
Antoine, who has never seen the ocean, runs within the current, but has nowhere to go. The film ends in the famous freeze frame with a closeup of the boy's face. Either he's been caught, doesn't know what to do, or this mimics the mugshot sequence that we saw before he went into the correctional facility. The ending leaves a lot to the imagination, but there's one thing that cannot be imagined: The 400 Blows is easily the most touching film I've ever seen. I don't think I'll see another one quite like this.
Everything seems to lock into place here. The acting superbly executes brilliant dialogue. Truffaut has some innovative camera movements (the darkening of the corridor while Antoine takes out the garbage and the final shot are examples of this) throughout. The musical score is beautiful. And, France isn't portrayed as this very romantic country. No, it is dark, it is gloomy. This is the dark side of this very storied nation. Here, Francois Truffaut tells his story to the viewer.
When I first bought 400 Blows, I didn't know what to expect. I figured I'd pick it up because 46 years after its initial release there was still a lot of critical buzz around it. I'm glad I spent the 30 dollars on this film, easily my favorite of all time next to 2001: A Space Odyssey.I only have one complaint: I wish I'd have seen The 400 Blows when I was 14. It probably would have saved my life more than the music I was listening to.
'The 400 blows' immediately introduces its hero in a breathless credit sequence: I mean the Eiffel Tower, glimpsed from different angles as the camera drives through the streets of Paris, emerging from behind buildings, through trees, opening onto avenues. It is a magnet - wherever you go you move towards it - and a totem.
This sequence is transposed later, when Antoine goes to the funfair, and rides on one of those moving cylinders, like a zoetrope. The comparison is deliberate - Truffaut is situating his film in film history, declaring his intention to start again, to get back to first principles, to a time when moving pictures was a medium of possibility, before it was bogged down by genre and the studio system. this zoetrope has a transformative power - it takes a character from neo-realism and abstracts him, turning him into a figure in a Grand Guignol, crawling in eternal circles. But, from his point of view, it completely transforms the outside world, from a thing of oppressive solidity content to stare in powerful distance, to a formless, unstable mass.
This sequence crystallises the power of Truffaut's film, its freedom and its concern with entrapment. It charts the decline into imprisonment of its main character with a style of buoyant liberation. So while Antoine is trapped in this barrel, he is also offered a new way of looking beyond those merely content to look on from the outside.'The 400 Blows' is the first masterpiece of the nouvelle vague, that iconoclastic movement that briefly saved cinema from stagnation as an art-form, just as it declared that it was an art-form (hmm, a connection?). It's a cliche now that Truffaut was the least innovative of the New Wavers, and yet it's still surprising that a film built so classically (moving from Paris to the countryside;
balancing the opening school scene, with its barred doors, with the closing borstal scene etc.) still achieves that tingling spontaneity so rare in the cinema (e.g. Jean-Pierre Leaud as an actor laughing with the crew as Albert Remy breaks an egg). The first viewing of '400' is such a rush you'd be forgiven for thinking that it, like 'A Bout de souffle', was made up on the spot, and it is only on subsequent viewings that you marvel at Truffaut's formal control, the rhythm of his camera movements and editing, the consideration of his compositions.
That image of spinning round a fixed pole is the one that haunts me. Just as the decline of Michel Poiccard in the Truffaut-scripted 'A Bout de souffle' is figured as a car running out of steam, so Antoine is forever running in circles, brought back to a fixed point, having gotten nowhere.
To move is to live - that is why the final freeze-frame is so frightening: Antoine has usurped the Eiffel Tower, has become the centre of the spinning top - he dominates the closing frame, just as the opening ones were empty (of humans). But at what cost? - has he simply wound down into inertia?: the subsequent Doinel films would suggest so. (that closing beach scene, in which Antoine seems to be running against moving, phosphorescent sand, also alludes to another great work about a young artist and his city, Joyce's 'Ulysses' and its chapter 'Proteus')
Although the film rarely shoots directly from his point of view, the style is an exuberant expression of Antoine's sensibility. Antoine is ambisexual, still seeking his identity, just before seeking sexuality - early on he sits at his mother's dressing table, his face splintered by the triptych mirrors; later he steals supplies from the ladies' toilet. This embodying of subjectivity in objective style is what saves the closing third from de Sica-like sentimentality and manipulation: we are rarely outside Antoine's head, people are wonderful or horrible as he experiences them. Only twice is his sensibility intruded on - when he is caught bringing back the typewriter, the captor creeping his point of view; and the interview with the faceless psychologist at the borstal, filmed as if behind a double-sided mirror, the feral animal penned at last.
'The 400 blows' is revered as a moving, melancholy picture of misdirected adolescence. It is sometimes forgotten that most of the film is pure comedy, delighting in gags, digressions, bits of business. For much of the running time, you envy Antoine - what joy it must be to be young and in Paris, swashbuckling in the schoolyard, truanting in the city, smoking cigars: his family situation is no worse that most, at least he has friends, a roof over his head, and can read Balzac.
Antoine is a bit of a clown: all clowns eventually settle down, make the right choices at crucial moments in their lives. Antoine somehow misses those rarely visible choices and finds himself locked up, descending the various levels of institutional hell. His often amiable and/or witty parents are no more evil than he is a saint, although an educational system that asks kids to simply copy down 'great' poems (a Sisyphean task in one ink-blotted case) is clearly wrong. Georges Delerue's score - romantic, exuberant, tragic, bittersweet - ranks with the three greats ('Vertigo', 'Taxi Driver', 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg').
This is one of the best films I have ever seen about children. It's not sentimental, but by the time it's over I really wish I could hug this kid. This is one of the most rewarding and perfect films I have seen period. The child protagonist is so likable and misunderstood, it's heartbreaking to see him get deeper and deeper into trouble. While watching this film I never felt like I was being manipulated or preached to in any way. What an accomplishment! The final images are so sad and beautiful. See it!
A Great Coming-of-age Movie
Author: Intern2014 from United States
27 October 2012
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
For his feature-film debut, critic-turned-director François Truffaut drew inspiration from his own troubled childhood. The 400 Blows stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's preteen alter ego. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy,it is about a misunderstood adolescent in Paris who is thought by his parents and teachers to be a troublemaker.
Misunderstood at home by his parents and tormented in school by his insensitive teacher, Antoine frequently runs away from both places. The boy finally quits school after being accused of plagiarism by his teacher. He steals a typewriter from his father to finance his plans to leave home. The father angrily turns Antoine over to the police, who lock the boy up with hardened criminals. A psychiatrist at a delinquency center probes Antoine's unhappiness, which he reveals in a fragmented series of monologues.
Poignant, exhilarating, and fun, this film is an important classic. Originally intended as a 20-minute short,it was expanded into a feature when Truffaut decided to elaborate on his self-analysis. For the benefit of Truffaut's fellow film buffs, The 400 Blows is full of brief references to favorite directors, notably Truffaut's then-idol Jean Vigo. The director's ode to his childhood is an engrossing watch that is alluring in its simplicity and brilliant in its direction. It flows nicely at its own pace, never allowing melodrama to ruin its realistic and voyeuristic atmosphere.In addition to that,it brought a fresh and piercingly honest portrayal of troubled youth to the screen. In many ways, Antonie Doinel is not only the cinematic embodiment of Truffaut, but also the French New Wave as a whole.Because of that,it has become one of the all-time great coming-of-age movies.
Author: Scott Ackerlund from United States
20 August 2012
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
François Truffaut's, "The 400 Blows," (1959) is an excellent character study of a youth living in poverty in Paris, France during the 1950's. Truffaut pulls many experiences from his own adolescent life to construct a very real telling of a troublesome young boy scorned by his teachers and parents because of his unquenchable thirst for exploration, excitement and what his superiors see as insubordination when it comes to society's rules. In under two hours Truffaut is able to tell the story of a troubled kid in Paris and subtly relate it to his own feelings about Cinema and its place in society at the time.
Antoine Doinel is a young boy growing up in a small poor house in Paris under his mother and step-father's rules. After several examples of how Antoine is treated by his parents and his instructors, he decides he must run away in order to be happy. After being caught and sent back home a few times, he meets another boy with similar goals as him and the two go on a crime spree throughout Paris. Eventually, Antoine gets caught stealing a typewriter and is sent to the juvenile detention center to be rehabilitated. After only a few days he escapes the juvenile center and runs toward the sea in hopes of freedom.
The film ends with a poignant freeze-frame of Antoine's face after he turns away from the sea and it is here that Truffaut freezes these characters and their story in cinematic history. These are characters forever locked into this particular story. Truffaut is drawing attention to the audience's knowledge that they just watched a film. The most important aspect of this film is not necessarily the story or characters themselves but rather the cinematic conventions that the film follows or breaks. You can compare Antoine Doinel to cinema itself in the way Truffaut see's the art form. He see's it as a young boy trying to be free and not follow society's rules.
400 Blows is a long desperate run away from conformity and to the freedom of the sea. Truffaut once said, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in anything in between." He uses freeze-frames, fades, dissolves, and jump cuts to inform the audience that they are watching a film and in doing so he and his fellow colleague's practically created the French New Wave style.
For all the things that 400 Blows says about society at the time, especially French society, the film's comparison to cinema itself, and the invention of a totally new cinematic movement, François Truffaut led the way for his contemporaries and himself to create new original films away from the traditional ideas of what a film had to be. The film went on to earn the 27 year old director the unique distinction of Best Director at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and has forever changed the way movies are conceptualized and produced. One of the original auteurs, François Truffaut's "400 Blows" raises hell in the cinematic world and has gone down as one of the greatest films every made.
French masterpiece
Author: bts1984 from Portugal
16 November 2010
This film is all about simplicity, but that doesn't stop it from being a masterpiece. Many times the most simple things are the best. Simplicity is often the right road to go far.
François Truffaut must have directed this film with all his dedication, heart and soul. It's realistic, touching, sensitive and human. It does a very good job in showing the existence's crisis faced by the teenagers, as well as showing how hard life can be in that complex phase of life. It also feels very nostalgic for many reasons, but it would take me forever to number them here.
Another thing which this movie triumphs is when it comes to settings by showing us the streets of Paris and many different areas of this city fondly known as the "City of Lights". The soundtrack is magnificent, it sounds so sad, so deep, so intense and so beautiful.
All in all, a wonderful movie, with very little to be improved. Even its ending is very expressive. There is something inspiring about that ending and it makes me wanna do the same thing. Antoine Doinel runs away to a beach, finally experiencing the sea. He wets his feet, but doesn't take his shoes and socks off. That "freezed" final shot of him looking at the camera accents the originality and makes it more memorable. I think that if he got into the water and swam (with a "freezed" final shot either), that would make the ending even more memorable.
Jean-Pierre Léaud is wonderful in the role of Antoine Doinel, a normal however troublesome 14-year-old boy. I mean, look at the way he is treated. His teacher hates him. His parents are a disaster together and give little credit to the boy. Can you blame him? But, as I said, the actor is wonderful. You don't see young actors like this anymore: this expressive, this natural, this charismatic, this confident in front of the camera, this talented... they're a vanishing breed.
Although of dramatic nature, there are elements of comedy in this great film. Certain scenes really make me laugh like few movies do now. Antoine Doinel is often funny and so is his good friend René (brilliantly portrayed by Patrick Auffay). Richard Kanayan is hilarious in every scene he shows up, even though his role is minor and he barely talks. But the things he does, combined with his figure and the actor's charisma and talent, make him hilarious. Guy Decomble is priceless as the impatient and short-tempered but hilarious French teacher, "fondly" nicknamed 'Petite Feuille' by his pupils.
Just about all the kids are very good. Claire Maurier and Albert Rémy are interesting choices to play Antoine's parents and they convince.
