Your parents say you’re always lying ✵ The 400 Blows - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

François Truffaut

WRITERS

François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy

STARS

Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble

BEFORE

1955 Truffaut’s first short, The Visit, is the tale of a bungled proposal of love. It is screened only for a handful of friends.

AFTER

1960 Jean-Luc Godard follows his colleague Truffaut into cinema with À bout de souffle.

1962 Truffaut’s Jules et Jim is a story of a love triangle set at the time of World War I.

1968 Jean-Pierre Léaud reprises the role of Antoine in Stolen Kisses.

Much has been written by critics about The 400 Blows. Indeed, the movie’s director, François Truffaut, was one of France’s best-known film critics before he decided to show the world how he thought movies should be made. He and the other filmmakers who led the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s believed that a director was an author (auteur) and the camera a pen (a “camera-pen,” or caméra-stylo).

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The poster for the movie’s cinematic release shows Antoine staring back at the land as he reaches the shore and can escape no further.

Semiautobiography

The 400 Blows is in part a painfully personal memoir describing Truffaut’s Parisian childhood, with certain names and events changed, not to disguise the victims, but to express something new and true. The young Truffaut becomes Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a fledgling troublemaker who is constantly accused of distorting the facts. “Your parents say you are always lying,” says the psychiatrist sent to figure him out. “Sometimes I’d tell them the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me,” replies the boy, “so I prefer to lie.”

Antoine reads the works of Honoré de Balzac, and when he adapts the author’s work for a school essay, using the thoughts and feelings to express his own emotions, he is punished by a teacher. It’s an act of homage condemned as plagiarism, and Antoine’s response is an act of delinquency: he steals a typewriter from his stepfather’s workplace.

"I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between."

François Truffaut

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Recreating adolescence

There is often romance in youthful rebellion, but The 400 Blows is not a nostalgic work. It does not look back on adolescence from an adult’s point of view, but rather recreates it in the present tense, as it is felt, in all its agony, uncertainty, joy, and heartlessness. The movie’s enigmatic English title comes from the French phrase faire les quatre cents coups, which mean “to raise hell,” which Antoine certainly does. He doesn’t steal the typewriter so he can use it—he plans to sell it and finance his escape from Paris. Truffaut is unafraid to color his protagonist as a mercenary as well as a lover of literature.

When Antoine has second thoughts about the theft, he attempts to return the typewriter, but is caught. His stepfather (Albert Rémy) decides to hand him over to the police, and the boy spends a night in a jail cell with prostitutes and thieves. The police take a mug shot, and the movie freezes for the instant in which the photograph—and Antoine—are captured. “Around here to escape is bad enough,” says an inmate at the institution to which Antoine is eventually sent, “but getting caught is worse.”

Truffaut mirrors this freeze-frame with the movie’s final shot, which captures Antoine in the act of escaping. He heads for the sea, which he has never seen, and runs down country roads until he arrives at the beach. The camera, like the boy, is constantly moving, keeping track of his flight. Antoine sprints into the surf, dips his toe in the ocean, then turns back to the land and looks straight into the camera. Truffaut freezes the image and zooms in on Antoine’s face.

It is a bold and ambiguous period at the end of the first chapter in Antoine’s life (Truffaut would continue to chronicle the character’s adventures in a series of movies). When he reaches the water’s edge, he can run no further. The final, frozen moment as he turns back seems to say that, far from having escaped, he will remain forever captured. The impression it makes is one of hope mixed with defeat.

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Antoine is caught as he tries to return the typewriter he stole from his stepfather’s workplace.

“We’ll put him in an orphanage so I can have some peace!”

Gilberte Doinel / The 400 Blows

Escape to the movies

Antoine finds another means of escape: the movies. He slips into a movie theater whenever he can, to lose himself in the dark of the theater’s seats and the images on the screen, much as the young Truffaut himself did.

It is here that the character’s life crosses irresistibly into the life of his creator. There is the constant sense that the director is trying to explore or exorcise his own past, redefining it with shots and scenes borrowed wholesale from other movies, such as Zero de Conduite (1933) and Little Fugitive (1953), in the same way that Antoine borrows from Balzac to make sense of himself. It’s not just a passion for the movies that Antoine and Truffaut have in common. Antoine doesn’t know who his biological father is, and he lives with a distant stepfather, just as the director did in his youth. Antoine runs away from home, as Truffaut did when he was eleven. Antoine tries to convince his teacher that his mother has died (one of his outrageous lies). The young Truffaut claimed that his father had been arrested by the Germans.

All movies comprise outrageous lies, and conjure worlds of illusion and pretense populated by people acting as someone they are not. But Truffaut’s debut movie proves that, when arranged for a certain purpose and related with heart, lies can reveal and illuminate the truth in a way that the bare facts cannot. It was this truth, as well as the promise of escape, that excited those French filmmakers who dipped their toes into the New Wave.

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The 400 Blows charts Antoine’s descent into delinquency, from classroom jokes to imprisonment, as the adult world rejects him.

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After Antoine sets fire to his shrine to Balzac, his favorite author, his stepfather threatens to send him to a military academy.

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT Director

It’s a brave film critic who picks up a camera and directs a movie of their own. François Truffaut did just that with The 400 Blows, and his courage paid off—the movie was hailed as a masterpiece, and Truffaut went on to direct more than 20 movies before his death in 1984.

As a journalist writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut pioneered the auteur theory, a controversial school of thought that identified the director as a movie’s author. Truffaut was critical of most contemporary French movies, earning the nickname “The Gravedigger of French Cinema.” But after The 400 Blows, his reputation was transformed.

Key movies

1959 The 400 Blows

1962 Jules et Jim

1966 Fahrenheit 451

1973 Day for Night

What else to watch: À bout de souffle (1960) ✵ Shoot the Piano Player (1960) ✵ Jules et Jim (1962) ✵ The Wild Child (1970) ✵ Two English Girls (1971) ✵ Day for Night (1973) ✵ The Story of Adele H. (1975) ✵ Small Change (1976)