THE 400 BLOWS, François Truffaut (1959) / Reach for life's ladder's bottom rung

ABOUT THE FILM
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents (Claire Maurier, Albert Remy), Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene (Patrick Auffray), trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

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Directed by François Truffaut
Produced by François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy
Screenplay by François Truffaut and Georges Charlot
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Edited by Marie Josèphe Yoyotte, Cécile Decugis, Michèle de Possel
Music: Jean Constantin
Release date: 4 May 1959
Running time: 1h 39m

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François's Truffaut's seminal film debut came to be identified with the breaking crest of filmmaking's French New Wave. The term nouvelle vague first appeared in a 1957 article written by journalist Françoise Giroud in the magazine L'Express. While initially used by Giroud to describe broader social and cultural changes in post-war France, the phrase was quickly adopted by film critics, including those at the cutting-edge journal Cahiers du Cinéma, to identify a young ascendant experimental group of filmmakers, many of whom also wrote for Cahiers. Auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer sprang from its pages to inaugurate an era of French film rejecting the Tradition de qualité ("Tradition of quality") of mainstream French cinema, which emphasized craft over innovation and old works over experimentation. Truffaut himself penned a manifesto-like 1954 essay, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français, where he denounced the adaptation of safe literary works into unimaginative films, heralding the dawn of a movement reflecting the flux and energy of the postwar Republic.

This convergence of aesthetic, historical, and cultural currents proved a buoyant force lifting Truffaut into the forefront of the movement. That force could be overbearing: he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival in 1958 due to his brutal, persistent criticism of the French film industry and the festival itself, which deemed him "the gravedigger of French cinema." His personal story fit hand-in-glove with nouvelle vague emphases, and The 400 Blows was the result. According to Annette Insdorf writing for the Criterion Collection, the film is "rooted in Truffaut's childhood." Both Antoine and Truffaut "found a substitute home in the movie theater" and both did not know their biological fathers, the kind of gritty, of-the-moment scenario offering a window on contemporary life. Throughout his career, including four subsequent films tracking the fictional life of Antoine Doinel (all starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the last of which, Love on the Run, was released in 1979), Truffaut turned to his restless, rootless hero to embody the spirit of the French New Wave, and his work seldom disappointed.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i89oN8v7RdY

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 99% of 72 reviews
iMDB: 8.0/10

The 400 Blows is widely considered one of the best films ever made. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the 100 greatest films, it was ranked 50th; their directors' poll ranked it 33rd.

The English title is a literal translation of the French that fails to capture its meaning, as the French title refers to the idiom "faire les quatre cents coups," meaning "to raise hell". On the first prints in the United States, subtitler and dubber Noelle Gillmore translated the title as Wild Oats, but the distributor Zenith objected and had it revert to The 400 Blows.

Publisher and film critic André Bazin famously rescued Truffaut from serious consequences regarding his military service. After Truffaut deserted the French army in 1951, avoiding service in Indochina, he was jailed, and Bazin used his influence, connections, and money to secure Truffaut's release and honorable discharge, subsequently taking him under his wing as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma.

One year after being banned from Cannes in 1958 for being a disruptive force in French cinema, Truffaut returned triumphantly in 1959, claiming the Best Director prize for The 400 Blows, his feature debut, Truffaut had married the daughter of Ignace Morganstern, a prosperous film distributor and theater owner, who inevitably said if-you-know-so-much-about-movies-let’s-see-you-make-one.

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
This film is where the French New Wave began. François Truffaut’s unpretentious, deeply felt, mostly autobiographical tale of outcast-adolescent rebellion still seems like a revelation even after nearly half a century .... Truffaut’s style is both breezy and self-assured, just right for accumulating an exquisite richness of emotional detail without ever sentimentalizing. This should be required viewing for today’s droves of would-be memoirsts in film or any other medium, and otherwise is simply a must for anybody who likes great movies. ∞ Jonathan Kiefer, Sacramento News and Review

Truffaut’s internal battle between nostalgia and anarchy is compelling (and probably reaches an early climax with Antoine’s graviton ride), but the vitality of 400 Blows, what keeps it potent long after many of its New Wave antecedents have come to appear stale and dated, comes from the symbiosis between real and reel life. ∞ Eric Henderson, Slant

Distinguished by its naturalistic, quasi-documentary approach and an extraordinary central performance from the 12-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, this is a blisteringly authentic story. ∞ Wendy Ide, The Times (UK)

This debut made Truffaut’s name, and that of his alter ego, Léaud. Like Fellini and Mastroianni or Scorsese and De Niro, theirs was a great collaboration: a sleight of character that conjured up a separate entity with a prettier face and a different ending. Or is it different? The famous last shot – a zoom to a freeze frame as Antoine flees reform school, truanting again but with better reason – is also a perfect depiction of Truffaut then, en route from nasty past to invisible but promising future. And isn’t that where most of us are? No wonder this film never dates: he was writing about what we all know. ∞ Nina Caplan, Time Out

But, for all his professional inexperience and his youthfulness (27 years), M. Truffaut has here turned out a picture that might be termed a small masterpiece. The striking distinctions of it are the clarity and honesty with which it presents a moving story of the troubles of a 12-year-old boy. Where previous films on similar subjects have been fatted and fictionalized with all sorts of adult misconceptions and sentimentalities, this is a smashingly convincing demonstration on the level of the boy — cool, firm and realistic, without a false note or a trace of goo. And yet, in its frank examination of the life of this tough Parisian kid as he moves through the lonely stages of disintegration at home and at school, it offers an overwhelming insight into the emotional confusion of the lad and a truly heartbreaking awareness of his unspoken agonies. ∞ Bosley Crowther, New
York Times

As Antoine, Léaud gives one of the great child performances. There is a poetic surliness to him that captures Antoine’s youthful “innocence” just as it’s beginning to curdle. It’s mostly a performance of authentic impulses and expressions, but there is also a remarkable sequence – captured by Truffaut in a handful of clever dissolve cuts – in which Antoine answers questions from a court-ordered psychologist. Finally faced with an adult who will genuinely listen to him, he delivers a monologue that’s 60 percent bravado and 40 percent aching for acceptance. ∞ Josh Larsen, LarsenOnFilm

To sum up, what shall I say? This: Les 400 Coups will be a film signed Frankness. Rapidity. Art. Novelty. Cinematograph. Originality. Impertinence. Seriousness. Tragedy. Renovation. Ubu-Roi. Fantasy. Ferocity. Affection. Universality. Tenderness. ∞ Jean-Luc Godard, Cahier du Cinéma