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The 400 Blows

Screening: Monday 30 April, 6:30pm

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, France 1959) [Les quatre cent coups]

A more indelible account of François Truffaut's unhappy childhood than any biographer could hope to offer, the auteur's 1959 feature debut stands as the most searingly personal of French New Wave classics. Like his 12-year-old alter ego Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the young Truffaut engaged in petty thievery as a means of finding the attention he longed for, while seeking out surrogate father figures through a filial affection for great artists (Balzac for the Antoine character, Renoir and Hitchcock for Truffaut).

So, too, Truffaut's masterpiece embodies many of the contradictions in his own character: It's at once exquisitely lyrical and thoroughly unsentimental, with Antoine's harsh teachers, tattletale classmates, and ineffectual parents contributing to a kind of poetic injustice that's oddly beautiful in its accuracy and attention to detail. As Antoine is systematically deprived of his rights as a French citizen (literally, of liberty, equality, and fraternity), the movie is structured as a search for identity and escape—culminating in the classic freeze-frame that suggests, on the one hand, another form of confinement, and, on the other, a host of possibilities. (Rob Nelson)

Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy. Photographed by Henri Dacaë. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble.

(35mm, B&W, 99 mins, In French with English subtitles, PG coarse language)

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