“Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I’d tell them the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me, so I prefer to lie.”

Plot Summary: A troubled youth, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) turns to a life of petty crime and delinquency.

Review:

The Four Hundred Blows was neither the first nor the last film to deal with troubled youth, but its knowing, compassionate examination of the issue has never been surpassed. With understated, unsentimental power, the film demonstrates the process by which the 13 year old Antoine, who’s stuck with derelict parents and unreasonably strict teachers, descends into delinquency. Even before Antoine is sent to reform school he seems imprisoned, not only by authority figures quick to punish and criticize but slow to guide and praise, but also by the very environment in which he exists, whether it be his cramped living quarters, his overcrowded classrooms or the small hiding spots he finds as refuge from the world. Is it any wonder he plays hooky and runs away from home in order to take to the streets, where at least he has some freedom from authority and space to move about?

Alas, with no responsible party around to intervene on Antoine’s behalf, his situation soon spirals out of control: the more trouble he gets into at school, the worse things become at home, and the worse things become at home, the more trouble he gets into at school. He’s stuck in an unfortunate cycle of neglect and abuse which spins him around - like that centrifuge he rides at the fair - faster and faster into ever-increasing degrees of confusion and desperation. By the time he escapes reform school and drifts aimlessly to the beach, Antoine, in a state of utter helplessness, has nowhere to run and nobody to turn to for help, and the film concludes, appropriately, with a haunting final freeze frame on Antoine’s face, fixing him in a moment of time, stuck somewhere between the fraught past and an uncertain future.

Trivia:

• Truffaut won the best director prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival

• Léaud, who would reprise the Doinel character in four subsequent Truffaut films over a 20 year span, was chosen for the part from a group of sixty boys

• The film is dedicated to André Bazin, a film critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma who became Truffaut’s mentor

Posted on May 16th, 2009 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews