The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film

The 400 Blows: a review of the great Francois Truffaut film!

Director Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film The 400 Blows came out in 1959 as part of the French New Wave movement. This film follows the difficult life of a boy named Antoine played by Jean Pierre Leaud.

The film opens in a classroom where students are secretly passing around a picture of a pin-up girl. At the precise moment that the picture touches Antoine's hand the teacher happens to look up from his desk and catches him red-handed. The teacher punishes Antoine again when he catches the boy scribbling a poem on the chalkboard. And it gets no better at home for Antoine as his young mother played by Claire Maurier and stepfather played by Albert Remy bicker about money in front of him and complain about how much he eats. Antoine can't seem to do anything right anywhere. Like school, he finds a creative outlet by developing an interest in a famous writer named Balzac. He even builds a small shrine for the writer but makes the mistake of placing a candle in it which almost burns down the apartment. The rest of the film goes on like this, broken up by little things like him skipping school and going to the carnival to spin around inside of a giant cylinder. 

This film is about how some people are just magnets for bad luck. The ambiguous ending invites the viewer to draw his own conclusions as to Antoine's ultimate fate. This is one of my favorite movies and despite how it sounds, there are a few light moments in the film. There's a lot of ways to look at The 400 Blows. In some ways, it's inspirational in that with all the negativity Antoine deals with that he's still resilient enough to try to have a childhood such as the carnival scene, that we were all once kids before we grew up. Criterion did a great job on this film. I have the DVD and it still looks great.