Antoine is a handful. First seen passing a girlie pinup calendar around the classroom, he\u2019s a habitual truant and disruptive class clown, taking out all the anxieties of his parents\u2019 collapsing marriage on the authority figures around him with a rebellious smirk. (As far as great filmmakers\u2019 fictionalized childhood stand-ins go, Antoine would probably steal Sammy Fabelman\u2019s lunch money and shove him in a locker.) He\u2019s a weird kid, an avid reader with a shrine to Balzac in his room, and to call his mood swings mercurial would be an understatement. Yet we can\u2019t help loving this little asshole all the same. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truffaut enjoys plunking down into the protagonist\u2019s perspective, allowing the camera to drift around with Antoine\u2019s POV in moments like the one where he gets distracted by his hectoring mother\u2019s new hat. Elsewhere, Truffaut and cinematographer Henri Deca\u00eb emphasize the schoolboy\u2019s smallness, framing his tiny young body against massive, relatively ancient edifices. The former war photographer had shot Louis Malle\u2019s Elevator to the Gallows<\/em><\/a> the previous year, and part of what makes The 400 Blows<\/em> so rich with sensation is the similarly run-and-gun approach Parisian street photography, hanging cameras out of windows and capturing a whole world around these characters as it goes bustling by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antoine skips school, tells stupid lies, runs away from home and stays out all night. One day while ditching class he spots his mom kissing somebody who sure isn\u2019t his stepdad, and the two will never speak of this moment again. But the grass isn\u2019t exactly greener on the swankier side of town, where his rich friend Rene has a drunkard for a mother and a degenerate gambler dad who tries to buy affections his son would much rather give freely. One of the movie\u2019s most lyrical interludes involves an audience of children laughing enthusiastically at a puppet show. Truffaut lingers on this moment for a long, lovely time, as if to remind us of the uncomplicated joy that children deserve but seldom receive. Especially not these kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s respite at the movies, but not in the hackneyed way we see in so many contemporary \u201clove letters to cinema.\u201d The last time we see the Doniel family happy together is after they\u2019ve gone to see Jacques Rivette\u2019s Paris Belongs To Us<\/em> (which actually wouldn\u2019t be released for another two years but Truffaut was pals with the director and threw it in as an inside joke.) At least he knows better than to subject us to that hackneyed shot you see in every other movie now where the characters gaze upwards, pie-eyed with a flickering projector beam behind their heads. (I swear if I have to see that shot again I\u2019m going to start levying fines.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The anarchic comedy and the quick cutting patterns slow down as Antoine begins getting into the kind of trouble he so easily can\u2019t talk his way out of. Typical of his rotten luck, he\u2019s finally arrested for stealing a typewriter not while absconding with the item, but rather when he breaks back into the place and tries to return it. His incarceration has an almost dreamlike quality, with the little boy being swallowed up by a giant, impersonal process. The scenes get baggier here, emphasizing the mundanity and dulled rhythms of institutionalized life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antoine is often seen descending stairs, usually from left to right, acting out a downward trajectory that nestles subconsciously in the viewer\u2019s head. When he finally slips free –probably not for the last time– the entire camera language changes altogether, exulting in Antoine finally finding the sea he\u2019s never seen, before ending with a famous freeze-frame that feels more like an accusation. Truffaut and L\u00e9aud would repeatedly return to Antoine Doniel over the next 20 years with three more films and a short, presaging Richard Linklater\u2019s Before<\/em> series and Boyhood<\/em> (and basically Linklater\u2019s entire career), finding this snarling, unsettled teen grown up to be a happily horny and gently inconsequential little man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n L\u00e9aud has worn the baggage of the role uneasily at times, often employed to comment playfully on cinema itself in some of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s more waggish works or as the movie-mad cuckold in Bernardo Bertolucci\u2019s Last Tango In Paris<\/em>. When L\u00e9aud spent the entire running time dying in Albert Serra\u2019s 2017 The Death Of Louis XIV<\/em>, we were meant to read it as an entire tradition of film passing away before our eyes, which is a heavy burden for any actor to bear. Had Truffaut himself not died tragically early at the age of 52, I like to think he would have continued checking in on Antione over the years. I wonder sometimes how he\u2019s doing. “The 400 Blows” is streaming on HBO Max<\/a>, the Criterion Channel<\/a>, and Kanopy<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/400-blows-still-1024x569.jpg\")
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