THE 400 BLOWS by François Truffaut
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
In 1959, a pair of newly released French films were instantly hailed as classics, going on to become the twin pillars of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. One, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle / Breathless, was bad; the other, François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents Coups / The 400 Blows, was good. But in fact, despite their reputations neither film can be called great cinema.
That said, Truffaut’s film is far better than Godard’s because it mostly avoids overt clichés, even as the screenplay — the film’s weakest element, written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussey — often bogs down in anomy. Like Godard, Truffaut shot his film in black and white, and indulged the real world (in addition to doing long takes), to try to feign naturalism. His approach, however, was often the outcome of necessity rather than choice, borne out of lack of financing rather than artistic vision.
While both Breathless and The 400 Blows achieved a feel closer to cinéma vérité — as a result of those technical contrivances — neither could really be thought of as innovative from a narrative viewpoint, for Breathless is a string of unsubverted clichés while The 400 Blows is a rather familiar tale of misspent youth. The latter film is, in a sense, an updated and less colorful — if hardly watered down — Charles Dickens tale transplanted across the English Channel.
Also, the film’s hero — the lower-class fourteen-year-old Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who sleeps in tattered pajamas and is supposed to represent Truffaut in this autobiographical film — is quite a bit less colorful than Dickens’ young protagonist con men. Although Antoine is constantly in trouble — he is called thief, arsonist, liar, and plagiarist — these are clearly things most young boys do in their formative years, with few ever turning into major criminals.
The film was shot in Truffaut’s childhood neighborhood in Paris, and follows Antoine’s descent into juvenile detention as he mouths off to teachers, gets into hot water with his pal Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), watches his sexpot blonde mother (Claire Maurier) — who is fond of tight sweaters, and who has the figure and ample bosom to warrant such fondness — cheat on his stepfather (Albert Remy), the man who gave him a ‘name’; pushes the aforementioned stepdad to the limit; and generally thumbs his nose at authority.
There is no story, and this anomy is supposed to be a breakthrough in mirroring reality. Of course, by its own nature art can never be reality, so when we see long drawn-out scenes they’re not brilliant but boring. There are nuggets of absolute brilliance here and there, however, and those nuggets, as well as the relative lack of clichés that adorn Breathless, that put these two films in different artistic leagues.
One of the best scenes in The 400 Blows has Rene’s dad seeing Antoine hiding in his son’s room, after they’ve been smoking, but does not say anything. Also, when the family actually bonds when they go to the movies, which leads to a scene where M. Doinel squeezes his wife’s lovely breasts playfully. And two bravura scenes at the end of the film where, interviewed by a psychologist, Antoine rambles on naturally about his life and situation, including his knowing his mother wanted to abort him (but was talked out of it by her mother, whom he’s stolen from), and his escape from the reform school, running toward the ocean he’s never seen.
At the film’s final freeze frame, Antoine can either stare at the endless and uncaring expanse or go back to confinement. It’s a good ending, but not as powerful that of another 1959 film with a beach finale: Federico Fellini’s La Dolce vita. In Fellini’s film, the ending suspends — it never exhales — and, in all truth, at least this viewer was considerably less engaged with Léaud’s young protagonist than with Marcello Mastroianni’s debauched character.
The scene with the psychologist has seen variants play out in films as diverse as Ingmar Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna / Winter Light and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. The former film takes the speaking to the camera in the opposite direction, with an actress, Ingrid Thulin, reciting a handwritten letter with no cuts, while Allen has his actress, Charlotte Rampling, looking into a camera and rambling on with quick cut edits that highlight her breakdown.
Truffaut splits the difference, cutting the interview replies seamlessly so that we get the sense of time wearing on the child, as his answers become increasingly more ‘real’ and personal. Henri Decaë’s cinematography is fluid but often just dies, and this change in energy within a scene seems to be happenstance, not intended, making the film reek its low budget and inartistic roots a bit too much. Jean Constantin’s music is a non-factor, for good or ill.
Other than that, there is not very much else to say about the actual interior film — for it is a picaresque whose vignettes just hang together enough to create an enjoyable viewing experience. That said, much of it is tedious — even though at 99 minutes, it avoids being too long — and an older and wiser (and daring) filmmaker would have made a better film.
Additionally, without Jean-Pierre Léaud The 400 Blows would not have been what it is. The young actor gives one of the four or five greatest child performances in film history. With a lesser performer, The 400 Blows would have been far more paint by the numbers, and I have a feeling that, given that Truffaut reportedly allowed Léaud to improvise his answers in the psychologist scene, the filmmaker was aware that the film’s success would either rise or fall with the young first-time actor.
It is also a key to understanding the film’s title that the four hundred blows are metaphoric for the knocks that young Doinel takes, as well as — supposedly — being French slang for ’sowing one’s wild oats.’ This slang explanation does not really make sense, though, so I wonder if it is merely one of those critical errors that just gets repeated ad nauseam by critics too lazy to actually investigate its verity.
[Note from the editor: Faire les 400 coups means "to party," "to be up to all sorts of mischief," or "to live without abididing by laws and rules." The expression originated from the 400 cannon shots that Catholic French King Louis XIII fired on the mostly protestant city of Montauban in 1621. The city's inhabitants, however, didn't surrender. Hence the expression.]
Truffaut actually got his start in film as a critic, writing for the notoriously pretentious and masturbatory French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He was a disciple of another of the seemingly endless –ismic gurus that pop up from time to time in certain art forms, the film critic André Bazin, whose ‘theories’ were the impetus behind the New Wave that launched Truffaut, Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer.
Truffaut was the most financially and critically successful of those directors until his death — of a brain tumor — at the age of 52 in 1983. His other great and internationally successful film, both critically and financially, was Jules et Jim / Jules and Jim (1962).
Now, if anything, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows has far more in common with Italian Neo-Realism than with Godard’s Breathless, for the techniques are hardly as radical, and the eye level view of Paris is in keeping with the best films of Vittorio De Sica, such as Ladri di biciclette / The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D.
The 400 Blows DVD is part of The Criterion Collection’s five-disc set "The Adventures of Antoine Doinel," which includes the features Baisers volés / Stolen Kisses (1968), Domicile conjugal / Bed and Board (1970), and L’Amour en fuite / Love on the Run (1979), in addition to the second Antoine film, a thirty-minute black-and-white segment from the 1962 anthology film L’Amour à vingt ans / Love at Twenty (which consists of short films from big name directors Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini, and Andrzej Wajda, and was a commercial and critical bomb).
Antoine and Colette is a mere footnote, with a few flashback scenes to The 400 Blows. We get caught up with the fact that the now seventeen-year-old Doinel, again played by Léaud, was caught after his escape, was reformed, and now works in a record-pressing company. He is on his own, still friends with René (Patrick Auffay), and unrequitedly in love with a girl named Colette (Marie-France Pisier), whom he meets at local lectures and concerts.
Despite gaining the approval from her parents to go out with Doinel, Colette does not have sexual feelings for him, and cruelly flaunts her new beau in his face — at dinner at her parents’ apartment, for instance — to emasculate the young man. This is the only good moment in the little film, which, were it not for the audience’s familiarity with Doinel from the earlier film, would have almost no resonance. The crucial character of Colette, aside from her good looks, is a total cipher, while Truffaut’s screenplay is almost nonexistent and Raoul Coutard’s cinematography by is merely generic.
Both films come in 2.35:1 aspect ratios, but there is no English-dubbed soundtrack — always a disappointment in this visual medium. Antoine and Colette is without a film commentary, but there are two appended to The 400 Blows. One is by Truffaut’s childhood friend — the inspiration for René — Robert Lachenay, but it has almost nothing to offer save a few ramblings on their childhood, and how real events seeped into the film. There is an enormous amount of dead air in Lachenay’s commentary, and it is curious as to why they just didn’t record an interview with him rather than trying to make it a commentary. The only worthwhile tidbit we learn is that Truffaut’s parents resented the film’s autobiographical nature.
The other commentary is better, if a bit generic. It is by American film expert and historian Brian Stonehill, who gives a rather paint-by-numbers commentary on the scenes and background, and reads a bit too fast from his script. He also goes overboard in trying to compare this rather familiar film narrative to the writings of Marcel Proust, or the first person narrative of The 400 Blows to Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
Still, given Lachenay’s poor commentary, Stonehill’s take is at least informative, especially when tidbits like the film being shot silent, with rerecorded dialogue and sound added back in show just how ‘unrealistic’ the New Wave films actually were.
The DVD also offers rare footage shots of some of the young actors in The 400 Blows, a French trailer for the film, newsreel footage of Léaud in Cannes for the festival, an excerpt from a French TV show, and another TV interview with Truffaut about The 400 Blows, where he sensibly admits it’s not as good as critics say it is.
Of course, leave it to film critics to a) miss some of the obvious flaws in the film’s technical presentation and b) wildly rhapsodize about certain aspects of the film in the most trite of ways. In an online essay, a critic named John Conomos, not only ejaculates ridiculously about The 400 Blows, but he does so in a prose so gushing, so teenaged, that it seems as if it might be the writings young Doinel plagiarized (not from Balzac, however, but from some French romance writer).
But, before you chide me for picking on the inept writings of a film critic, be warned. Roger Ebert, the most famed American film critic of the last fifty years and a Pulitzer Prize winner (even if not for intellectual vigor), places The 400 Blows on his list of one hundred greatest films. That gesture may give insight into how Ebert can also consider Steven Spielberg a great film director.
In any case, The 400 Blows is no more than a good film with several great moments — like Antoine in the Gravitron or when his gym class starts thinning out as they jog with their teacher. Yet, its flaws highlight why most schools, movements, or -isms fail. They do so because artists naturally must break free from the artificial constraints such ideas and ideals impose. Delimited art is generally bad art. And this film’s formlessness, in addition to some corny moments as a single tear in Doinel’s eye as he is taken away in a prison truck, doom The 400 Blows from reaching the greatness it may have attained with a better screenplay and a more experienced eye both behind the camera and in the editing room.
The 400 Blows is a worthwhile film, nonetheless, one that held out the potential for later and greater works. That’s more than many first films, New Wave or not, have ever done, and something Antoine Doinel may embody, if never quite achieve.
© Dan Schneider
Les Quatre cents Coups / The 400 Blows (1959). Director: François Truffaut. Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Patrick Auffay.
Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”
Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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“Truffaut actually got his start in film as a critic, writing for the notoriously pretentious and masturbatory French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma” (Schneider)
Ok, I have begin my comment by quoting your ridiculous review of The 400 Blows. I’ve now read three of your reviews of French New Wave films (400 Blows, Breathless, Contempt) and I don’t know where you get off with comments like the one quoted above. Ok…so you don’t like the French New Wave, we get it…why don’t you write about something else then. In all three of your reviews, you denigrate film critics while it seems fairly obvious to me that these articles would land you firmly within the confines of film criticism. You cannot discount the influence and importance of the critical and theoretical view put forward by ‘Cahiers du Cinema’. Two words sum it up: Auteur Theory. While there are definite flaws within this theoreticlal framework, i.e. the theory places all emphasis on the author (usually the director) of the film when in fact, making a film is one of the most collaborative forms of art. But, criticisms aside, the theory completely changed the way the Hollywood studios operated and gave tons more artistic control to the directors. Without this reorganising of the studio system we may not have had the pleasure of multiple films by great directors like Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, Lynch…I could go on. If nothing else, the French New Wave and the critics of ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ were crucial to restructuring of the film industry we know today.
Lets take a look at a few more of your quotes:
1.) “Of course, leave it to film critics to a) miss some of the obvious flaws in the film’s technical presentation and b) wildly rhapsodize about certain aspects of the film in the most trite of ways. In an online essay, a critic named John Conomos, not only ejaculates ridiculously about The 400 Blows, but he does so in a prose so gushing, so teenaged, that it seems as if it might be the writings young Doinel plagiarized (not from Balzac, however, but from some French romance writer).” (Review of ‘The 400 Blows’)
2.) “as for the Breathless DVD, it offers an inane film commentary by film critic David Sterritt that basically consists of him oohing and aahing over the film’s most meaningless dialogue or technical contrivances. As with most apologists, he does not defend what the film achieves, only what it intends to achieve.” (Review of ‘Breathless’)
3.) “bankrupt intellectualized aesthetics of film critic André Bazin.” (Review of ‘Contempt’)
4.) “Whenever one reads positive essays or reviews on Godard, all one gets are elaborate explanations for what was attempted, rather than an assessment of whether or not what is on-screen is successful. This is always the first sign of an inferior critic talking about a work of art that is not nearly as good as the critic claims.” (Review of ‘Contempt’)
5.) “usual critical fellatrics” (Review of ‘Contempt’)
6.) “That sort of artistic anomy may make many vapid critics drool, but it is not great art.” (Review of ‘Contempt’)
So, I’ve looked at Cosmoetica and Cinemension as well as your Wiki entry (which I assume was written by you) and I think I understand why you hate the French New Wave so much…you’re an instigator. You take a generally accepted maxim, i.e. ‘The french new wave was responsible for producing some good films and has been hugely influential within the film industry’, then you develop an argument that you may or may not have evidence to support. This argument will be designed to create controversy in order to further your career as a poet/critic/blah/blah/blah/blah. It seems to be working for you but don’t expect anyone to take you seriously if these are the kind of statements you’re going make.
Malachi.
1) I do not like nor dislike New Wave films. I take any work of art on its merits. The fact is that most of the films were wildly overrated, for the reasons enumerated. Like has NOTHING to do with critical thought- which is intellectual. Like is an emotional response.
2) Clearly, though, you like Cahiers, because, like their reviews, it takes you a few paragraphs to make a simple point.
3)Auteur theory merely stated the obvious, which existed since the silents. Griffith, Murnau, Lang, Chaplin, etc. were all pretty much recognized as singular artists. Ho-hum.
4) You did not refute a single quote of mine, because they were on the money.
5) I always back up my critiques, and not based on emotionalism. You may disagree. So?