Famous last words, as they say. Truffaut took him up on his offer, and the result was The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), a film that would forever change the landscape of not only the French cinema, but cinema worldwide. It is hard to imagine that such a seemingly simple film, a loosely autobiographical portrait of youth in revolt (the title comes from the phrase “fait les quatre cents coups,” which means “to raise hell”), would have such a lasting impact, but the result is undeniable. Although not technically the first film of the vaunted French New Wave, The 400 Blows received such critical and commercial success that it empowered Truffaut, and the movement as a whole, in a way that no other film did. Films by Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette followed soon after, and the cinematic landscape would never be the same again.

The 400 Blows introduced the unforgettable character of Antoine Doinel, a romantic who would become the central figure of a quintet of films over two decades, offering an unparalleled opportunity to watch a character grow and mature on-screen. Doinel was played in all his incarnations by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who became as much a part of the character as Truffaut, on whose life Antoine was modeled. In The 400 Blows, Antoine is an irrepressible 12-year-old who lashes out against all the authorial figures bent on keeping him in line, whether it be his sadistic French teacher (Guy Decomble) or his working-class parents (Claire Maurier and Albert Rémy), who are much like Truffaut’s own parents: not bad people, just “nervous and busy,” in Truffaut’s own words.

Léaud’s performance is a marvel in the way he conveys Antoine’s frustration with the world around him and the inability of adults to understand him. More importantly, though, he conveys the sense that he doesn’t always understand his own actions. They are often the results of an impulsivity that arises from deep within his own rebellion, which in turn is born of an idealized romanticism that defines his character. Yet, he is determined to take responsibility for his actions, however impulsive and ill-thought, which gives the film a crucial existential thread that came to characterize much of Truffaut’s work, particularly the Antoine Doinel films. The famous final freeze-frame that ends The 400 Blows is a perfect summation of the film’s themes of individuality and personal responsibility.

Shot in gorgeous black and white anamorphic widescreen by Henri Decaë, who started as a documentarian in World War II and later worked with such French luminaries as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and Roger Vadim, The 400 Blows expertly captures the day-to-day rhythms of life in Paris in the late 1950s, strikingly foregrounding the French New Wave’s characteristic insistence on location photography. Whether the scene is taking place in the regimented classroom of Antoine’s school, the busy Parisian streets, or the cramped apartment where he lives with his parents, the film conveys a gritty sense of being there that is neither highly stylized nor flat and documentary-like; it is a unique visual achievement that made the film stand out from both previous French films that prided themselves on being “cinema of quality” and the heavily studio-bound products of U.S. producers and their Production-Code-limited subject matter. The achievement of The 400 Blows was best summed up by fellow New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard in his review of the film in Cahiers: “the proudest, stubbornest, most obstinate, in other words most free, film in the world.”

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

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