While not the first example of the French New Wave, The 400 Blows really is the film that gave the movement its legitimacy. It brought director Francois Truffaut a Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and received international acclaim that shone a light on France's new group of critics turned directors (from the Cahiers du Cinema). As is typical of the Oscars, it rewarded a film it didn't quite understand with a single, simple nomination for Best Screenplay.
While some of the things that comprise the New Wave Movement stood out to me (the long, tracking shots of Antoine running at the end of the film, the use of profanity and the focus on individual), so many of these stylistic choices have been copied to no end since that it didn't stick out as unusual or as groundbreaking as it may have in the time it was released. Which strikes me as somewhat strange, since the methods of a film like Citizen Kane do still feel surprising and easily observed (this is most likely due to the fact that I'm more familiar with the American cinema that Citizen Kane was a departure from, whereas I'm completely unfamiliar with the French cinema that The 400 Blows and this entire movement is a response to).
So what struck me about The 400 Blows, a film that I liked a great deal, was its strength of character and the manner with which director Francois Truffaut presents it, or as his own characters declare coming out of a film, "It has depth!"
The film is an acknowledged autobiographical tale of a 12-year-old Antoine, in the Truffaut role, a boy that has problems and a knack for drawing the ire of his teachers and parents (most notably his mother). After getting caught cutting school and lying to his professor that his mother dying was the reason for his missing class, Antoine starts to believe he can no longer live at home and ventures out to live on the streets and to become a man. Eventually this leads him to steal his father's own typewriter and attempt to pawn it off, only to fail and get caught whilst trying to return it. That proves to be the final straw, landing Antoine in the correctional school that his parents had threatened and he had left home trying to avoid.
It's not radical storytelling but the power of the film comes from its characterizations, how these people are presented.
While Antoine is a troublemaker and even the film's French title means "to raise hell," you can also easily see it's not his intention. The first time he gets in trouble at school, he's caught drawing on a provocative calendar that a number of boys before him had passed around, only for Antoine to be the one to get caught.
His friend Rene is really the reason for him to miss school as well, goading him into leaving his notebook behind and spending the day at the fairgrounds instead. Plus, Rene is the one who tells him to forge a note, which Antoine fails to be able to do, and in a panic exclaims that his mother died as a way to stop his professor's snarky comments. His decision to do so also seems like a clear act of revolt against his mother for having seen her kissing another man while he was cutting school the day before.
The professors also resent Antoine for not finishing his homework, but Truffaut plainly shows Antoine attempting to do his homework on numerous occasions only to be interrupted by his parents because of dinner and to send him on errands.
So Antoine is obviously a complex kid. He's not a saint by any means, but he's also not the hell-raiser that people believe him to be. It isn't until Antoine faces a life on the streets that he begins to do things really morally lacking - first stealing a bottle of milk, then money from his grandmother and ultimately the typewriter.
But he's also dealing with parents that don't really know how to handle him.
His father seems like a goof, friendly and well-meaning but slight and easily ignored. He doesn't amount to much and that seems to be one of the reasons his wife is cheating on him.
Whereas his mother treats him as if he were an errand boy, sending him to pick up flour for her, fetch her shoes and take out the garbage. She also overreacts, constantly yelling at the boy "for no reason" as he would state later. The boy is not nurtured at all, and mother and father are routinely playing off one another, arguing and taking shots at Antoine and using them against one another. His mother even spends the money that was meant for sheets for Antoine's bed, so the boy is forced to continue sleeping in a sleeping bag. After his first attempt at running away results in his parents snapping him up at school the following day, his mother starts to react differently towards him. Washing him, kissing him and allowing Antoine to sleep in their bed but it's still evident she doesn't know how to truly care for him. She even goes so far as to bribe Antoine into doing well in school, and in Antoine's attempt to make his mother proud he plagiarizes a story, is caught and subsequently runs away again.
What Truffaut does is get the childhood moments exactly right. I love how Antoine feels like every bad decision he makes, every mistake is the end of the world. I loved the musical score, the accompanying freedom and earnestness of it. There's a sense of wonder to the music that echoes Antoine's look at life.
Truffaut is not trying to condemn these parents either though. His father seems likable enough and his mother, while easily frustrated, does seem to care for Antoine. There's a moment in the middle of the film when the family all goes to the movies where they could be any other happy family in the world.
It's really a fascinating film. When the film gets to the correctional school, it starts to look at the punishment those kids go through there, but the most interesting scene to me was Antoine's interview with a psychiatrist. It's a revealing moment when we find out Antoine has lived most his life with his grandmother, only being given back to his parents when his grandmother got too old to care for him. We also find out that his mother had originally wanted an abortion and his grandmother talked her out of it, and that Antoine knows his dad is not his real dad. It's even more psychological trauma this boy has been dealing with, things that don't define him as a human being but noticeably makeup his constitution.
That type of observation is what makes The 400 Blows so wonderful, so surprising and so profound.
Or as they say, "It has depth!"
