Les quatre cents coups
François Truffaut (1959)
As far as I know, François Truffaut’s first feature is also his best – from start to finish. The 400 Blows’ opening shots give Paris an unromantic, even intimidating look, though with Jean Constantin’s plangent theme music already beginning to tell another story. The last, rightly celebrated, image is a freeze frame, as Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) turns to face the camera. The film and its pre-adolescent protagonist are always on the move: the finale sees Antoine, who has been sent to a centre for juvenile delinquents, absconding during a football game. He keeps running, through countryside, all the way to a sea shore and the water’s edge. That’s where he has to stop. He does so and looks at us.
There are so many highlights – usually funny, often with an undercurrent of desperation, such as Antoine’s ill-fated decision to paraphrase Balzac for a school essay. A journey back from the cinema, at the end of an evening that Antoine, his mother Gilberte (Claire Maurier) and his stepfather Julien (Albert Rémy) have enjoyed together, is a rare moment of family harmony. The hero’s friend, René Bigey (Patrick Auffay), shows cool assurance exploiting his in-depth knowledge of domestic routines to get what he wants and conceal from his parents (Georges Flamant and Yvonne Claudie) Antoine’s presence in the Bigey home. A gym teacher (Luc Andrieux) leads his class out of school on a run: as the procession, viewed by Truffaut’s camera from on high, moves through the streets, its members peel off in twos and threes, down alleyways and into shop entrances – by the end of the sequence only a handful of boys still follow the leader. The enthralled faces of younger children, at a Punch and Judy show that Antoine and René sneak into, are a treat. This is an outstanding example of Truffaut using documentary technique to lyrical effect – a combination he repeatedly achieves with the help of Henri Decaë’s black-and-white cinematography for the film. (The location shooting in Paris has, at this distance in time, an absorbing historical interest.)
Julien Doinel, exasperated by his truanting, thieving stepson, eventually turns Antoine over to the police: we share the child’s shock as he spends the night in a cell. It’s almost insulting to Truffaut to compare this film with Hollywood misunderstood-teenager movies of the period like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961). Like Ray’s and Kazan’s young principals, Antoine Doinel can be seen as a victim of unkind or foolish authority figures yet he is so vividly individual and Truffaut’s tone so far from preachy that the effect is quite different. It helps that Antoine’s parents and a collection of variously ineffectual schoolmasters (including Guy Decomble and Pierre Repp) are individual, too. Each of them credibly (and entertainingly) reflects a troubling social reality but they never seem to be representing The Older Generation, as Hollywood equivalents tend to do. It no doubt helped that Truffaut, who wrote the screenplay with Marcel Moussy, drew on his own unsettled childhood in The 400 Blows: he fuses film-making flair and imagination with personal understanding of his subject.
To explain the qualifying clause that begins this note: the other Truffauts I’ve seen are Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Jules and Jim (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Day for Night (1973), The Story of Adèle H (1975) and Finally, Sunday! (1983)[1]. In other words, I don’t know any of the three subsequent Antoine Doinel features (Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979))[2]. I have to confess they don’t appeal because of the adult actor Jean-Pierre Léaud grew into – able but self-aware, and rather posey (in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Day for Night, anyway). The BFI trailer for their current Truffaut season includes clips of Léaud at different ages. The adult versions are unrecognisable from the early teenage one.
The 400 Blows was his second film after King on Horseback (1958). As Léaud explains in his initial screen test (the outstanding moment of Emmanuel Laurent‘s mediocre documentary, Two in the Wave (2010))[3], his mother was the actress Jacqueline Pierreux and he was being privately educated at a boarding school. He was fourteen at the time: when Truffaut points out that Antoine is meant to be twelve and a half, Léaud quickly insists that he’s small for his age. In other words, this wasn’t any kind of street kid that Truffaut happened to find. Léaud is simply great in the role – tough and vulnerable, eager yet distrustful of the adult world. Antoine’s interview with an unseen psychologist or social worker at the delinquency centre is a bit incongruous in the context of the picture as a whole yet Léaud is so naturally animated that he makes it work.
The film’s English title, famous as it is, is a purely literal translation that doesn’t reflect the French idiom: faire les quatre cents coups means to raise hell. Even shorn of the verb, the phrase, to French ears, must have suggested a rebel; the English suggests, if anything, a victim (the blows almost akin to slings and arrows of misfortune). Jean-Pierre Léaud beautifully captures both aspects of Antoine. Truffaut had a rare talent for directing children: three years later, he also drew a lovely performance, albeit in a much smaller role, from Sabine Haudepin in Jules and Jim. Watching that film again recently, I thought it diminished by the passage of time and, for all its virtues, encumbered by its load of romantic philosophy and voiceover narration. Truffaut had no need of that in this earlier work. It isn’t short of dialogue that’s both painful and amusing; more often than not, though, the imagery speaks for itself. The 400 Blows still feels amazingly fresh.
11 January 2022
[1] Afternote: A few days after this latest viewing of The 400 Blows, I added The Last Metro (1980) to the list – that certainly didn’t dislodge Truffaut’s debut film from the top of the tree. I should probably admit it’s more than fifty years since I saw Fahrenheit 451 and The Bride Wore Black, both of which I’ll be returning to in the next few weeks.
[2] There’s also a short, Antoine and Colette (1962).
[3] It’s available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULovABBn2ds.
